Hi! I’m new here and hope that I am posting this in the correct place
I am currently beginning my final university project for my bachelor thesis. The goal of the project is to have a drone (quadrocopter) that can autonomously fly between gps-waypoints, land at a special cargo station, pick up a small box, take off, fly to a predefined gps-location and drop the packet off.
My question now refers to the hardware setup; mainly the flight controller.
Since I am a student, I am not willing to pay 400€ for a flight controller. Up to about 200€ would be fine for me; cheaper would be better, of course.
I need a flight controller, that I can control / send messages to from a Raspberry Pi or Arduino: “fly to this gps location”, “fly a little bit to the left”, “go down 30cm” …
Background: My current plan is to have a Raspberry Pi (or Arduino) as the high-level mission planner: Communicate with a server and start the drone when needed. Use all kinds of sensors and communicate with the cargo station. The Raspberry Pi may also implement some kind of collision avoidance and communicate with other drones in the future.
So, finally my question:
What flight controller(s) can you recommend, that fulfill(s) my requirements?
Any currently supported flight controller should work though I would at least go for more powerful CPU if the drone is yours to keep and preferably at least two IMU for redundancy.
For the higher end of your budget you can get a Qio-Tek Zealot H743 with heated IMUs and redundant sensors. I haven’t used one but there are a number of threads about them on these forums.
I have a Matek H743-wing v2 that has worked fine so far in a just-for-fun fixed-wing.
Thank you very much for your answers! I have decided on the Qui-Tek Zealot H743, since it has - as @cbf123 stated - headed IMUs, redundant and vibration dampened sensors, a built-in gps module, sturdy aluminum case, …
Since my drone won’t be small (approx. 40cm [~15"] motor to motor), I think that I won’t have many problems fitting a bigger flight controller (, a Raspberry Pi, other sensors, …) to it. My drone has to be able to carry a (small) cargo box anyway.
For the telemetry link I will use the SiK Telemetry Radio V3 from Holybro.
I am very excited on starting this project and finally using ArduPilot!
