Hello. I am building a Zohd Dart 250 and want to actually keep it under 250g.
I found these parts and just wondering if any one can comment on any drawbacks of using these very light components?
HGLRC M100 MINI GPS (UBLOX chip). Is this compatible?
MATEK F405 F405-MiniTE FC
Or is someone can recommend something else better or cheaper that would be great.
I would use the Matek H743-mini. It’s what I have in a sub 250 craft. F4’s are getting old.
Thanks so much for your reply Dave. The Matek H743 Mini is about twice the price of the F405 I mentioned (and twice the price of what I paid for the Zohd model itself:). The cheapest I was able to find it is about $120 USD. Is there somewhere that sells this stuff cheaper than banggood and AliExpress?
I saw the Kakute H7 series which are light and much less expensive. Do I need to use a separate ESC with these?
The Kakute H7 Mini is a good flight controller for the price, and Holybro sells it stacked with a 4-in-1 ESC, if you so desire. None of the options you’ve mentioned so far include the ESCs.
One drawback of the Kakute H7 Mini is its lack of SD card for logging or advanced scripting functions. On such a tiny copter, I don’t think that will be much of a drawback, just know that you cannot enable Lua scripting, and log filespace will be limited to the onboard NAND memory (128MB, I think). You’ll have to retrieve the logs over USB rather than having the convenience of a removeable SD card.
ThanksYuri. It is not a copter though it is a Zohd Dart 250 (plane). In that case do I need an ESC at all?
If you plan on using a brushless motor, then yes. Just replace the word “copter” with “plane” in my post - it’s all still relevant.
EDIT: It looks like the plane comes in a kit with a motor, ESC, and servos, so you won’t need to buy a separate ESC, but you’ll need to make use of the one that’s included.
No, that’s the going rate. As Yuri says the Kakute H7 Mini is a good option if you won’t miss the features it lacks. These days as Ardupilot continues to add new features Future Proofing is an important factor for me. I wouldn’t necessarily need 2 IMU’s (Matek H743’s) but logging to Sd and Lua scripting as an option I think are important. Just for me though!
OK thanks again Yuri and Dave. Is the GPS I chose compatible with Ardupilot? I didnt see it in the list but it is a UBLOX based one. (HGLRC M100 MINI GPS)
I think that GPS would be compatible, and it looks very nice for the price, but…
There is no compass module, meaning you will need that separately. It’d be hard to beat the price of the Matek M8Q-5883, which includes a compatible GPS and compass.
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The HGLRC M100-5883 GPS version already includes a compass.
I’m also interested to know if these modules work with Ardupilot.
While I can’t specifically confirm that module in particular works, the Neo-M10 GPS and HMC5883 I2C compass module are both very common and supported. There’s no reason that one shouldn’t work.
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Depending on what you plan to do with this aircraft - you can get by in ArduPlane without a compass module. I have done fully autonomous missions without one in the past many times.
if your not bothered about lua there is little point to getting a h7 controller like the kakute, the main advantage of the h7 is that it can have all the features loaded at the same time and it can run lua scripting, if your building a 250g plane you dont need the whole firmware as your only going to have a couple of components attached, you dont need 20 different compass and gps drivers, your not using proximity, your not using optical flow, or VTOL so you can just select the parts you need from the custom firmware builder.
other than the scripted acrobatics and controlling LEDS there isnt any lua applets for a standard plane.
I have the same plane and run a speedybee f405 mini wing with ardupilot. its much easier to setup on a plane as it has a built in BEC for the servos. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006805994893.html