Hi everyone,
I’ve been using the pixhawk for quite some time now, and now with pixhawk 2 (solo) out, I was wondering, will the original pixhawk ever support smartshots like cable cam or orbit? Is it a hardware limitation, or just too much work on the software part?
Happy flights!
besteves,
The Solo smart shots are written in python and run on the companion computer which is an iMX6 board that flies along with the Pixhawk2. Those python scripts send position and velocity requests to Copter (aka APM:Copter, ArduCopter) using MAVLink. There’s no reason why a Pixhawk1 (or any of the clone boards) couldn’t fill the same role as the Pixhawk2 but it’s the python scripts and that companion computer that most people don’t have on their vehicles.
If another manufacturer (or individual) wanted to join the dev team and work on an open source equivalent to “SoloLink” we’d be very happy to help them. It’s not particularly hard and we already have some documentation on integrating companion computers on the wiki. dev.ardupilot.com/wiki/companion-computers/
Hello rmackay9,
Thank you for your detailed reply. When the solo came out I heard about it having two boards, but I didn’t realize that one was specific to handle the smart stuff.
Very interesting to hear that this is something that a pixhawk could do, even if it needs an extra board. Would be nice if they made the board open source + code, but I guess that won’t happen soon
Best regards