I read the story of Pixhawk and the Cube family on the forum. As I understand it, Cube Black belongs to the Pixhawk FMU family, while Cube Orange is a different project under ProfiCNC.
I’ve been flying with Cube Orange for about 1.5 years and it’s a really great card. Besides, I’ve been designing my own flight control hardware for the last 5-6 months, based on STM32H7.
But when I looked at the market, I saw a lot of confusing (or at least confusing to me) things.
For example, I just came across the Holybro Pixhawk 5X FMUv5X. Now is this the successor of Cube Orange or a completely different series from it? Actually what I want to dorm is Cube Orange follows FMUvXX generation. Or where can I find detailed information about this subject.
I think it was called Cube Black FMUv2. However, I am sure that Cube Orange is different from Black inside, even though it looks similar on the outside.
Thank you very much if you can enlighten me on this. I’ve been using this hardware family for a long time, but I couldn’t clear this confusion in my head.
I can’t give you much history or describe the relationships between the companies and hardware standards. But I can tell you that the Pixhawk 5X is based on the FMU5X standard and uses an STM32F7 processor, which is slightly underpowered compared to the STM32H7 that runs the Cube Orange. If you want a Holybro product of similar capability, look at the Durandal.
As I understand it, the Cube architecture is derived from the Pixhawk standard but does not necessarily follow a specific Pixhawk FMU-series.
The companies making this hardware and the organizations responsible for the standards have created an unfortunate mess of things, which is the source of endless confusion for those new to the ecosystem. There’s the Pixhawk organization, who publishes the FMUvX standards, but then there’s countless “Pixhawk” branded boards with revisions like 1.8.x, 2.x, 4, etc, some of which are entirely backwards with respect to expectation. Adding insult to injury and confusion to many is the PX4 software project, which is easily confused as a hardware spec but is actually autopilot firmware.
I would just add one relevant thing here. The DroneCode Foundation (Cue the Star Wars Imperial Death March ). Of note is Ardupilot is not associated with it. Drone Code
Why? Ardupilot-DroneCode
). Of note is Ardupilot is not associated with it.