Hi, I have 2 birds. A trex 500 clone and a old Thunder Tiger Raptor 90 that has a 3 blades head (assy blades) and OS GT15HZ motor with EzUHF.
On my trex I have a Align APM Lite and I hate this thing I dont trust it at all. I’d like my big gasser to have something alike but more reliable and with more tools like vibrations graphs.
Is Arducopter “safe” to use or I will crash for sure at some point? My goal is stable camera plateform and waypoints navigation. Is hobbyking’s Px4Pilot 32Bit the thing to get? I have read a fair amount and I understand that Px4 is the latest hardware?
Hi, as a beginner it would be nice to read the Copter documentation to understand what you will get. There you will find the answer for most of your questions, it helped me a lot!
Basically Ardupilot is a software organized in 3 different flavours: Copter, Plane, and Rover. Since you are interested in using the Copter firmware, you will also need to choose the hardware to flash it. Options include: Pixhawk, HKPilot32, AUAV PixRacer, PixFalcon, Pixhawk Lite, Intel Aero, and the list goes on. Personally, I have a very good experience using HKPilot32 and Pixhawk Lite using both Copter and Plane. No crashes so far!
That said, I would suggest the HKPilot32 Kit as a starting point. It will give you GPS, Telemetry, and waypoint navigation. Be aware that you also need to learn how to use a Ground Station. Mission Planner will help you to flash the Copter firmware and also do all necessary configurations.
Try to be patient and read carefully the documentation.
There is a learning curve, but the more you learn the more you will love it!
Hope this can help you! Happy flying!
I ordered “PixFalcon Micro PX4 Autopilot plus Micro M8N GPS and Mega PBD Power Module” from HK and I’ll experiment on my trex500. I’m happy this project exist because everyone is playing with drones and helis barely got a taste of flight computers before drones stole the show.
English is not my main language, I read about the traditional heli devlopment and did I read there is no further updates for traditional helis? That the devs are on ArduCopter (drones) and not on helis anymore?