Rover-4.5.5-beta2 is available for beta testing

ArduRover Rover 4.5
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Rover-4.5.5-beta2 has been released for beta testing and can be installed using MP or QGC’s beta firmwares link. Alternatively the firmware can be directly downloaded from firmware.ardupilot.org.

The changes vs -beta1 are in the ReleaseNotes and copied below

  1. Board specific enhancements and bug fixes
  • CubeRed’s second core disabled at boot to avoid spurious writes to RAM
  • CubeRed bootloader’s dual endpoint update method fixed

This fix should make uploading firmware to the CubeRed easier

1 Like
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Since this release seems centered around the Cube Red, what’s so special about it? It looks like a Cube Orange with an H7 IOMCU. Appears to offer no additional IO over its predecessors. As I understand, Ethernet is better managed on the Cube Red than many other boards. But if that’s the only tangible advantage, I’m not seeing the extra $650 in value…

There was some discussion a while back about parallel AP instances for redundancy, but that doesn’t seem to have manifested.

Plus all the purchase links claim it is still in alpha, which seems like a long time for a product that was showcased at a dev conference at least 2 years ago.

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Hi @Yuri_Rage,

I think the interesting features of the CubeRed are redundant main CPUs which could allow improved reliability. There’s definitely a lot of interest in this subject looking at the number of likes on this recent blog post.

The CubeRed is also the only CubePilot autopilot that has ethernet support although I hear there is a serial-to-ethernet board coming soon.

EDIT: BTW one of the CubePilot devs put a lot of effort into adding ethernet support to ArduPilot and I suspect that effort was related to this hardware release

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Fair points, and I appreciate the effort. At the same time, I’m not sold on 3x to 4x price for a maybe someday redundancy feature.