We’ve been doing this kind of work for quite a while, it’s… interesting, especially adapting the firmware in case you’re not exactly following another board schematics precisely.
ChibiOS has a very powerful way of adapting to any board or integrating new devices like GPS etc, but needs some knowledge of the MCU feature and peripheral set to properly design the board and have all working.
Should you need some specific help let us know, here or in private.
This is essentially identical in the DroneCode FMU specs.
It doesn’t really need to be a pixhawk. We only need a board that can run any of the firmware’s Skybrush already has adapted for their swarm system. That’s why we wanted a schematic for something that can run FMUv3 or FMUv5 firmware.
Right now we’re using a H743-slim V4 board along with a T-motor 45A 4in1 ESC.Works great but as the number of components grow it becomes quite a mess.
The drone is small and needs to be light weight. Making the entire board ourselves will probably be less expensive in the long run. Minimizing wires and soldering also brings down production times. We plan on building lots of them.
I initially wanted to go for the cube. I’ve used it for many years with no hardware related failures. But after some discussion with my customer, it was unfortunately too expensive for them. Therefor the push for smaller boards and the decision to make it all ourselves.
I do also like the motherboard method though. Probably will make it easier to develop newer versions without sweapping FC and swapping FC without the other stuff as well.
I hope my customers e-CAD designer can do something with the schematics provided here!
Writing hwdef that satisfies skybrush requirements shouldn’t be that hard.