I’m in the middle of selecting flight controllers for upcoming ArduPilot-based projects, and I’ve been realizing how biased personal experience can be.
On paper, CubePilot, CUAV, and Holybro all look solid. But specs don’t really tell you what happens after months of real use — field debugging, odd behaviors, long-term reliability, ecosystem issues, etc.
So I’m curious: for those of you who have actually used more than one of these platforms, what made you stick with one or move away from another?
Not looking for “the best one”, just real-world reasons and experiences.
I have products from both Holybro and Cubepilot. I have also investigated the use CUAV products.
Unfortunately none of these companies offer real time support (at least in north America). there are some emails you can use but often the support is slow.
I have used all 3 of those and they are all good. I have CubeOrange+'s, a few Holybro Kakutes and a CUAV 7-Nano. I choose the one that best suits the application. Along with others that are good from Matek and TBS.
I’ve not found one to be superior to another with respect to user experience, so long as expectations are properly managed. For example, an inexpensive Kakute with no internal damping or heating and relatively few redundant components can’t really compete in the same use cases as a Cube or Pixhawk6 series, but it could be perfect for a simple FPV quadcopter build. As Dave says, match the hardware to the application.
All manufacturers mentioned thus far are ArduPilot partners and maintain presence on this forum. I have been able to get fairly prompt support from all three, though I do admit a slight edge to CubePilot on response time and ease of communication.
Like @dkemxr I’ve used all those brands. I also use a lot of Matek controllers and I have my first TBS on the way. They’re all good for their purpose. I don’t stick to one brand or another, I tend to pick the one I need based on the use case. Features, form factor, size/weight, availability and cost.
Long way to say, if you’re picking between those brands then you’ll be okay. Pick the unit that has the features you want, and then see if you can get it.
I am actually located at Mid East recently. My supervisor prefers to use Cube Orange, mainly because he believes Cube flight controllers have very good vibration resistance.
I personally haven’t been able to find much solid data or documentation to clearly support this point. Have you had any experience with this, or paid attention to vibration performance when using Cube controllers?
May I ask if there are any other channels to obtain real-time technical support, besides the official forum and the email address listed on the website?
I second the question, although moreso for their “Here” products. I originally selected a Here in our next gen designs but had to walk away from it after unresolved issues.
To your point about vibrations, I’ve used the CubeOrange+ on a few platforms where vibes were non trivial to deal with. In all cases, use of the isolated imus introduced higher amplitude noise with a lower noise floor, whereas the isolated imu provided somewhat higher “Vibe” message vibes (read impulse accelerations) with the benefit of lower gyro noise peaks, allowing for less intense filtering. As a result, lower frequency vibration energy (so gyro noise) was easier to manage using the hard mounted imu in spite of the higher noise floor. In my case, I was dealing with large craft where the motor noise frequencies remain low. You can usually clearly see the dampening effect of the isolation foam, but it doesn’t seem to take effect until quite a high frequency.
I don’t have the logs at my fingertips, but I can provide some graphs in the near future if you’re still interested