Nice Marc, I follow your experience with this board 
I will post my progress. I think $79 is a good price for these boards.
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hello, olliw42, I’m not an expert , but I just plug my Zubax gps to the CAN port of the Mrobotics X2.1 and it works without swapping anything .
I’m not sure what you expect me to reply now.
I’m not an expert either, and just look at the documentation provided, that is the connection diagram here https://github.com/mRoboticsIO/Hardware/wiki/X2.1 and the electrical scheme here https://github.com/mRoboticsIO/Hardware/blob/master/X2.1/Docs/x21_V2_schematic.pdf. According to both, CL and CH are swapped with respect to e.g. pixracer and P2.1, and what appears to be the standard.
I did not want to deny your remark about CL and CH swapped.
I just wanted to point out that using the board with the provided cable , I did not have to do anything special to have the Zubax Gps to work with the 2.1
Well, ordered one, along with one of their GPS’.
The GPS seems solid. Locks on super quickly, even indoors.
Form factor for the X2.1 is good. It’s very small. I like the USB extension, but will miss the a separate I2C port.
There’s an option for buying a separate I2C splitter with a GPS pass-through, but it’s $29.
However, the biggest thing I missed, is that you cannot power the X2.1 from the servo power rail. This means that with any kind of power failure/brown-out, you’re screwed.
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Anyone flying the X2.1 on a racing-class copter? I’m curious if it works as well as PixRacer in that environment.
You would have to direct solder the wires. If you use the headers, it actually ends up taking a significant amount of space. You might get away with on a full 250 sized frame, with vertical headers, though.
Sure. I spend a lot of time with racing drones, and soldering straight to pads is pretty much the norm. I haven’t used a header on any racing controllers for 3 or 4 years. I actually remove the RC-out and WiFi headers on PixRacer, as they are too bulky for my build, and really don’t serve any useful function for me. Guess the WiFi would if I used WiFi, but I don’t. Fortunately they provide an option to get the X2.1 without headers installed, which I guess is one of the things that interests me. We’re building these systems in mass, and it’s a bit of labor to remove the headers from PixRacer. I have no complaints on the performance of PixRacer though.
My biggest concern would be sensitivity to vibrations. The PixRacer does really well. I have mine almost hard-mounted to my frame, just using elastomeric male/female spacers from the frame to the PR, and flight logs show a really clean vibration environment for the controller. This is on a stretched frame for 7" props, which tend to be more vibration prone than smaller 5" builds. In fact, the same frame with a generic F4 racing controller cannot fly in stabilized mode, as there is too much noise for the accelerometers. The X2.1 uses almost the same IMU models as the PixRacer, so I suspect it would be similar, but I was just curious if anyone had actually done it and had some feedback. Maybe I’ll be the guinea pig.