Hi everyone, great to see this fantastic project is still active 
I have an old Nano Talon and a Matek F405 Wing FC that my 3 year old is super excited to get flying! I haven’t done anything UAV related for several years, is my F405-wing still supported with latest firmware, or should I update it t something more recent?
Thanks
The Matel F405 Wing is still being supported
Hmm OK I should have done a bit more digging first! I couldn’t see this board in the FC list but then dug down into the discontinued section and found it there:
https://ardupilot.org/plane/docs/common-matekf405-wing.html
The product page confirms it has max 1MB RAM:
https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32f405-415.html
Limitations:
https://ardupilot.org/plane/docs/common-limited-firmware.html#common-limited-firmware
https://firmware.ardupilot.org/Plane/stable/MatekF405-Wing/features.txt
According to features.txt it looks like compass calibration is enabled which is good, but I don’t know enough to know if anything else disabled there will be a problem.
There’s a great list of resources here:
https://www.mateksys.com/?portfolio=f405-wing#tab-id-6
I guess as the combination of my total lack of flying skills and a 3year old who really wants to fly himself the chances are even if I get it airborne it probably won’t last very long in one piece, so I might as well give this old FC a go
It’s fine if you don’t need scripting or any other feature that requires more CPU power. If a feature is missing in the official binary you can always build a custom one at https://custom.ardupilot.org.
Thanks for the replies and info
I still have F405-WINGs in most of my planes, the oldest was in fact already running in a Nano Talon (don’t remind me of that flying brick though) 5 or 6 years ago and I’m just about to re-use it for the 2nd time in large glider.
Great to know
So I know nothing planes. Is the Nano Talon (v1) a decent enough plane to learn on? I found when the experience quite frustrating when I tried it many moons ago but a lot of that was getting arduplane configured correctly and to learn how to launch it. I then got it flying find in the heavily assisted modes but as soon as I turned those off and banked into a corner I always lost control.
The Nano Talon is definitely not a plane to be flown in manual mode by beginners. I had to realize that too back then when it was my first ‘real’ plane. It is designed for FPV, with large fusilage and (too) small wing area. I did like its futuristic look, but there is a reason no real plane looks like it: A design like this just doesn’t fly that well.
Of course experienced people can fly it manually, no question, but for a beginner (or just if you want more relaxed flying characteristics), a classic pusher glider design with large wing area is a much better choice. It doesn’t look as cool, but it just flies 10 times better.
The disadvantage with those gliders is that they’re often old (proven) designs that date back to pre-FPV times, so it’s much harder to get all the gear inside than with a Nano Talon - unless you pick a really big one.
That’s another thing I had wrong in the beginning: As a beginner you might think it’s best to start with a small plane. But actually the bigger a plane is, the better it flies. Small planes usually have to be flown faster and feel more unstable in the wind.
Right, that’s a bit of a relief actually - it wasn’t all me being a complete idiot then!
Well I’ve still got the talon nano and a spare fuselage (albeit with a broken wing spur I can’t find spares for), so I might as well fly this to destruction and then buy something more suitable at that point. It would be great to maybe add a beginner howto guide to the docs. The really cool thing about arduplane is that once you actually get it configured ready to fly, it’s so cool for beginners. It has so many features that prevent newbies from crashing, help them to launch/land, prevent stalls, various levels of stability assistance, geofencing, altitude floors etc.
And to get a plane tune you petty much only have to go through parameters, which is tedious and may require some guesswork if the plane manufacturer didn’t give all the information and then manage to throw the plane into the air and get it high enough to do autotune.