Open-source hardware ideas

Hardware Other Hardware
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Hi everyone!

I’ve been in the industry for the past six years, mostly working on hardware design for heavy-lift copters. Over that time, I’ve worked on everything from power supplies and ESCs to flight controllers, smart batteries, and various peripherals.

I’ve benefited a lot from the open-source community, and I’d like to give something back. One idea I’ve been considering is developing and publishing a few new open-source hardware designs. To start, I’m thinking about an ESC and a DroneCAN battery fuel gauge, but I’m also open to suggestions for other hardware that the community would find useful.

I’d really appreciate your input. What features would you like to see in these designs? Are there any other pieces of hardware you think would be valuable to develop and release as open source? Any feedback, ideas, or exotic requirements from would be very welcome.

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VimDrones and rmackay9 are working on open source BMS.

Personally I would love to see a good (based on quality components) reference design for an Ardupilot flight controller without IOMCU with explanation of design choices. Preferably with options for Ethernet and dual CAN.

I care more about open schematics as I want to work on small drones that benefit from custom PCBs.

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I’ve never included an IOMCU in any of my flight controller designs. Both ethernet and dual CAN are easily doable. What about redundant sensors?

The plan is to release both the schematics and PCB designs (4-layer with 0603 components for manual assembly).

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for small size board, 2 IMUs are usually enough and maybe 2 barometers. Having heaters is a good plus but small board cant have them as for heating they need to be properly enclosed and that makes it much more bulky.