Hi!
I’m planning to build a drone in the future with a maximum TOW about 3500g to carry a MILC camera and a lens for about 25-30 minutes flight time.
I have pretty good experiences with Micoair743 flight controller, so I’m planning to use this for this build.
One way is a large 15inch quadcopter, which is pretty simple with 4 motors, but it’s huge because of the propeller and frame size.
The other way is to build an X8 copter with much smaller propellers and motors and frame. This will have motor redundancy as well. I’m tending to choose this direction.
An X8 copter needs 8 outputs for the motor and I also need several outputs for controlling my camera:
- Gimbal servo control via PWM
- Camera trigger via GPIO
- Camera setting change via GPIO
- Status LEDs to visually indicate the drone status to be able to see from the ground (via GPIO)
To be able to have these functions I’m going to need a CAN node as a “port extender”. For this purposes the Mateksys CAN-G474 seems to be a good solution, connected to the flight controller via DroneCAN bus.
https://www.mateksys.com/?portfolio=can-g474
It has a lot of outputs and it’s outputs are in 4 groups.
Is it feasible to assign the PWM servo to this node’s Group4, and set Group1 and Group2 to relay outputs, so I can have 8 relay outputs to control my camera?
Are there any pitfalls, that can make my life harder? 
Thank you!