Hi. I am building my first autonomous vehicle and I am massively overwhelmed by the options for rover autopilots. Could definitely use some advice as someone fairly new to microcontrollers as well. Is the idea that the majority of them already have IMUs and GPS? We are looking to add a second GPS for redundancy so free serial ports are a must. How many serial ports are generally needed? Looking at wind speed, wind vane, GPS, and radar for object detection. At least four I imagine?
Does anyone have any suggestions for boards for sailboats? Of course the lower the cost the better, willing to do soldering and manual sensor hookups to keep it cheaper as well. Also planning on a wing over fabric sails. Thanks in advance, super excited about the project!
Honestly lots of things will work, but think through your peripherals and sensors and make sure you have enough places to hook everything up. Analog wind vanes need analog pins, NMEA use serial, etc. If you plan on any lua scripting don’t get the F405 processor, use one with the H7 or F7 and an SD card.
I like the matek wing line of boards, they are well established and provide pretty good documentation. The wing models have power to run servos which is nice on a sailboat and not present on quadcopter oriented flight controllers, and the 0.1 inch pin spacing is easy for soldering compared to surface mount pads or hard-to-find connectors. My sailboat uses a F405 but I have an electric boat with the F765-Wing and I just bought an H743 WLite for a new project.
If you are super low budget there are many F405 options or even an older px4/pixhawk clone will work but for the extra $30 or whatever I think it’s worth it to upgrade and keep your options open.
Microcontrollers are different from flight controllers. FC will have gyros and accelerometers and many other things to make it work with ardupilot. Microcontrollers are more general purpose, ardupilot isn’t really an arduino thing any more despite the name.