You basically need the funky board because of the connection options. There are some mods people have done putting lenses on but they don’t work well. I think there are some banggood type alternatives but for the price the vanilla pi camera is best. You can also use an HDMI converter board (e.g. to use a gopro), but that’s quite expensive and increases the latency. I had to play around with the camera settings quite a bit to get a FOV that works for a mini quad and decent latency. That said, there is a lot of image processing that goes on in the pi, so despite the weedy looking camera the image is really nice with good dynamic range etc.
Do you know XBee? You can use it for telemetry… It is very light. About 3.9g with wire antenna. I have some XBee Pro S3B and I will try to use it…
I do not think Xbee are compatible with mavlink, but I may be wrong.
Mounting it needs some work. I use the pie zero with ez broadcast and the pie zero spy cam I’ts the smallest camera (including cable) that iv’e seen for the pie zero.
Here are some pictures. In this one you can see the pizero with the CSL 300 stick above it both in heatshrink. I had to de-solder the USB connector from the CSL and replace it with a regular header. I have used two airscrews on the WiFi card which gives pretty good performance for 5.8Gz. You can also see the camera connector which I have wrapper in copper tape.
Here’s the camera. Would like to mount this at an angle but not got around to it yet
and in this one you can see the micro UBEC I’ve used to power the setup
This is what the receiving side looks like. Two Alfa 051NH’s, mad mushroom and cyclone antenna. Pi3B, BEC (inside the Pi) and headplay SE goggles. Not true HD but a lot better than my dominator v2 HDs. The spikes are so I can stick them in the ground easily.
I can’t really show you inside the googles, but here’s a flavour on my HDMI monitor
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It is very interesting. What Pi is the platform of choice now? I think wiki says pizero is no longer supported and 3a+ or 3b+ needed? Which one?
pizero is fine for tx, just not rx. I have a pi 3B, I don’t think the 3B+ is yet supported.
I have a question about configuring ESCs (4-in-1 Tekko32 from Holybro) with the KakuteF7 board flashed with Arducopter.
BlHeliSuite32 does not work once the F7 board is not BEtaflight/Cleanflight anymore (it can’t connect in passthrough mode to the ESCs).C Is this a normal behaviour? I assume so.
So my question is : how do I access the ESCs parameters to configure them ? In mission planner (which connects succesfully to the F7 autopilot) I only find an ESC calibration menu which is useless with a Dshot protocol anyway.
So how do I do this ?
I have dual antenna one and waiting a 1w tx to test and I can comment results
BlHeliSuite32 works with passthrough on a KakuteF7 (ArduCopter 3.7.0-dev) and the Tekko32 ESC board. See instructions here.
Thanks, great info. Works now.
I wonder why the parameter SERVO_BHL_AUTO is not set on by default in the Arducopter versions for F4 and F7 boards (since all of these boards will use BlHeli ESCs).
I did a test on 2S voltage support on the Holybro and RAcerstar Tattoo 4 in 1 ESCs:
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(This wasn’t supposed to be a direct reply to Andy, but I’m not sure how to undo that… anyway…)
Hi Guys,
I just returned from spending a couple weeks in the desert… I had my MicroArducopter with me. I’m glad I did, too, because there aren’t a lot of points of reference out there, and I would have surely been lost w/out the GPS/OSD pointing my way home on several occasions. Here’s a vid of a relatively long flight. I had a few longer, but don’t have OSD recordings of them, and wanted to post one w/ the OSD.
At some point in my desert trip my video got pretty wobbly (as it is in this vid)… I just noticed one of my motors is missing its C clip, so that fell off at some point, and I had a really loose motor! I’m not sure where I’m going to find a tiny replacement C clip…
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In Aliexpress. Search " E Clip" .
hi, i got some weird issue today.
if you have a working model with nano v6 in it - can you try to replicate pls? just pull latest master, compile, flash, and see in OSD after boot from lipo if any messages are still showing up in OSD.
I haven’t had a chance to do this yet, but just looked at the dev chat, and it looks like you’ve all found the issue over there. Let me know if you still need anything…
it is all fixed now thx to Peter. works fine. latest build got proper driver for tfmini lidar that allows simply to plug it in as is with no prior setup and it ‘just works’ - quite nice. i added it to my owl frame to make it hold altitude indoors.
latest toy i play with now in house is this one:
https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?3154412-Emax-TinyHawk-Racing-Whoop
but it only runs betaflight. fun little thing. now i got 8 of those things, wife gives me an evil eye. 
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Hugues, thanks for that test.
Even the tattoo isn’t great… Mine shuts down at about 6v, so 3v per cell… Your measurement is probably more accurate, so I’ll assume it’s the same 3.2v per cell.
It’s not really good enough… Sometimes in the cold my voltage drops to almost 5v when it’s 1/2 full and under load.
My old blheli_S esc’s all go down to at least 5v… I’ve never had one cut power to the motors, and I know my battery has sagged lower than that. All the blheli_32 ESC’s seem to be 6v at best… I have to slow down a lot towards the end of my flights to keep the voltage up…
I don’t understand the change, and why no one else is talking about it… Maybe we’re the only ones in the world building 2s copters?? heh…
2s i would think is not very popular. smallest ones are 1s, then i think it is easier to go with 3s. so it very well may be so.
i did 2 3" models - gecko on 4s/4000kv and owl on 3s, on 5000kv motors - and i prefer gecko by far. more punch, more time to fly… not sure how it would work on 2s at all.