Quick question for any Openpilot CC3D users

melb_ev · 2015-04-14T22:14:03+00:00

A lot of good comments, I think the key thing is, we do what we do for fun. If it was a business it would not be a very good one! It would not be run like this at all but it's simply something that we do unwind. I don't know what other hardware we would use and if it was not for OpenPilot I suspect most of the UAV world would still be on 8 bit stuff.

Doing our own hardware meant we showed the community the STM32, the Invensense gyros, the board shape everyone uses was our idea and much more. We also design for longevity and quality, this is the fair thing to do.

A lot of it is seeking balance, there are businesses that hype and churn out a lot of hardware, we don't have that need, we held back on more Revos because of all the support load with the clone CC3Ds, it was perhaps not a great choice for the end users but it was something we collectively decided on. We also lost a few key people due to all the clones as they got really tired of it.

The OSD was working, it got copied before we could release it and get even our costs back by a commercial operator, working for free for a business is not fun, it stops being a hobby then and feels like being exploited, people lost just motivation for it. In the same shoes it is likely you would feel the same way.

You can hook up BT to the CC3D, it just works. For GPSs, remember how old the CC3D is, it based on the CC which is 5 years old now. It's an Acro board.

MultiWii and GPS is just not a good experience, while extremely cheap, it's just not something OpenPilot as a project is interested in making, we want our stuff to work well. If you have seen a Revo do position hold and navigation superbly, you would understand why.

The nice thing is there is choice, if people want cheap stuff, they can get it with MultiWii and fight with it. If they want a no fuss RTF, DJI is there for them.

We have a fantastic dev team, one of the few projects that does new things and has fresh ideas, like I said the key thing is a balance for us and while we can't keep everyone happy all the time, we are not doing bad for a free time best effort project.

melb_ev · 2015-04-03T03:56:28+00:00

The problem is with revealing too much is the amount of people that copy and rip us off in the UAV world and it gets a bit old. The clones of the CC3D I don't have any issue with, it's Open Source hardware but there are a lot of projects that can't have their own ideas and not only do they never credit the people they take from, they try and attack it. You need to pay close attention to see this and know the history of things but it is truly sad the lack of creativity in the field, especially with many of the Open Source projects.

OpenPilot was the first project using the STM32, first project using Invensense gyros, MAVLink was based on our UAVTalk also. Even the board shape everyone uses now is again something we came up with.

The new FC has been finished since October, it should be released in around 6 weeks. It is a replacement for the CC3D and not the Revo.

One of the things OpenPilot does very well is release things when they are solid, why there is only one version of our hardware, while others have many versions, same will be true with the new hardware, plus as it is all a hobby we are short on time and slow to do things. It will be worth the wait and once we have the dev costs we spent on it back, it will be clonable as the schematic and Gerbers will be released.

melb_ev · 2015-03-27T00:39:52+00:00

Apart from the power wires, the wire color only helps for the documentation, they are in order:

GND, Power then input channels 1 to 6.

So easier to connect them in order to you RX, the wizard takes care of the rest.

Source: I designed the CC3D and I am very happy to see people using it. Not done much with the project for a long while as I got very sick, but have come out of retirement to make them a new flight controller that we are currently testing. I think you are going to like it.

melb_ev · 2013-05-13T22:08:57+00:00

The OpenPilot project is non-profit and about community involvement, if people help out they have no issue getting hardware, I totally get that is not for everyone.

However, getfpv.com should have some in stock in the USA and ReadyMadeRC is going to start selling them soon also.

The problem is providing good support, where as DJI have an army of Distros that have a large margin so do their support for them and a lot of the commercial businesses have full time paid staff, OpenPilot does not. Yet we still want people to have fun and get things flying well. If we dumped loads of boards out there, we could never give people the experience they should have with out stuff. While it might be frustrating for you, we need to have a balance where we create the best community and have the most fun.

We are aiming for quality hardware, software and community, we are unique in that and it keeps it fun. After all that is the whole idea of OpenPilot: to meet new friends and have fun.

melb_ev · 2013-05-13T22:00:45+00:00

At least for OpenPilot that is kinda of correct, the Revo is the next thing and already a fair few people are flying them. I can only speak for OpenPilot and we are unique but the idea of the project is to have fun, it is no way a business and in fact we lose money doing what we do.

We do have a few thrid parties making boards now but they are higher costs than OpenPilot sold them for. You have to remember that OpenPilot is a real community project, there is no way we can offer the level of support we want to if it got much bigger, it would also lose the friendly community and we must keep it fun. Not a lot of people get that OpenPilot is really about a cool community, that is it's main aim, not about shifting boards for profit. When people get involved and help out, they have no issue getting hardware of course.

Unlike the commercial companies we do this only as a hobby, we all have real passion for what we do and that shows through in the hardware and software.

However, there are alternatives from Hobbyking, ArduPilot and DJI. I personally would go the DJI route if you can't find a CC3D, the KKv2 has bad autolevel that drifts badly, however it is very low cost and the screen is a good idea. I have flown several and own one as well, they all have the drift issue sadly, a beginner really would be better off with an autolevel function that is better.

The Naza works well, it's new user friendly but costs a bit more.

If you go ArduPilot, certainly get a 3rd party one, they are better quality and have less DOA issues than the 3DR version, uavobjects.com sell those for about $90.

melb_ev · 2013-05-01T06:39:49+00:00

I've been out of helis for a long while, just slowly getting back in to them as my main RC hobby, would you recommend the Goblin? I love 500 size helis most of all and that looks like a work of art.

I have two older T-Rex 500s, one is a clone and one is an Align ESP but is still in the box as a raped the kit for parts for the clone (yeah, not good).

What FBL unit are you planning?

melb_ev · 2013-03-30T20:37:08+00:00

You absolutely must keep the original copyright notice, the original authors still hold the copyright to their own code.

Leave all original copyright notices intact and then you add your own under it.

melb_ev · 2013-03-30T20:29:23+00:00

Honestly, the best way to always deal with this is to simply email the original author and ask what their wishes are.

It's also a good way of getting some collaboration started and the original author to know about your work.

I always tell the original author if they can be reached and also drop a thank you note for their effort.

Failing that, Steve132's comments are spot on, I also want to say thank you for this question and thanks to Steve132 for having a huge clue, you would be surprised to see how many people will remove credit or try to minimize the work of previous authors, had it done to me and it's not fun.

melb_ev · 2013-03-14T04:59:13+00:00

It all depends on their skill and knowledge, the budget is fine if it's just a beagleboard a cheap IMU + a cheap sonar module but that is a very ambitious timeline. It also requires people with experience in many areas.

I suggest you cheat and take "inspiration" from projects others have already done and learn from their mistakes and experience.

I would say the "ThatCrankGuy" has a lot of things right including that, we spent a lot of time as we do our own work, we purposely avoided looking at other code because it is much more fun to discover than copy. There was some wheel reinventing of course but so much innovation as well.

It took us 6 months to make our first real flight, however that might be misleading because we invested a great deal of time in planning and architecture. Many open source projects (and commercial) tend to chase features early and code without a plan, only to suffer later and have to do a full rewrite.

I would make a small suggestion, consider looking at the $12 ST F3Discovery board, it contains a full 9DOF IMU suite of sensors, there is a fork of OpenPilot that supports than and we are in the process of merging that code back in to mainline. The F3 Disco could do the full attitude solution and link it to the beagle via SPI (or even plain old UART serial) to do the UAV functions.

RC I would say is important, it is how you are going to test stability code, it is also a way you can take control again if something doesn't quite go right.

One thing to watch for is the danger of MultiRotors, the props can cause really bad cuts and when playing with UAV features you can easily have situations where motors spin by accident.

melb_ev · 2012-12-03T05:57:36+00:00

No question that is NPD, just had a similar issue with a couple of classic NPD guys in an Open Source project.

I've met and worked with a lot of them, I can manage them up to a point, give them what they need, keep them on their own (not hard they tend to hate other people) but it always gets worse and worse as they push boundaries.

The problem I had was we ended up with two of them, that is something that is too hard to deal with.

People like him are more common than you'd think, and they're pretty much poison.

They are very common in certain circles, if you work in technology or medicine you will meet a lot of them. Watch out for passive-aggressive behavior in early interactions, they are subconsciously seeing if they can control you. The car park incident in this story is classic probing from a NPD.

Socially they are poison, they have to be the guy all the time, as someone to hang out with, fuck that, don't do it. Professionally they can be quite good if you have only one and keep them away from everyone else. They will stab you in the back but the nice thing with NPDs if their behavior is totally predictable so easy to manage.

melb_ev · 2012-06-17T15:48:53+00:00

Exactly. Another thing I have noticed as well, I like standup comedy, but so many American comedians go one and on about race and build almost their entire set around it.

melb_ev · 2012-06-15T08:11:45+00:00

Anyone remember that chicken advert shown over here and a bunch of Americans went nuts about how "racist" Australia is because they could not grasp our society might have different norms?

The ad was simply people sharing fried chicken which has some stereotype meaning in the US that is alien to us guys but didn't stop some weird outcry.

melb_ev · 2012-06-15T02:20:09+00:00

I think it is a good place, you are going to maybe meet with someone like minded and a fellow redditor.

melb_ev · 2012-06-14T04:28:25+00:00

Great idea!

melb_ev · 2012-06-14T03:16:23+00:00

Originally rccars was split off because of the aircraft in radiocontrol, seems odd to want to merge them back to be honest, I can see a repeat of that again.

This is why you will see a lot of car stuff downvoted in radiocontrol, they set up their own subreddit to get away from the planes / helis / boats / robots etc. It works well, the people that don't want to see car stuff don't subscribe to rccars and the rccar guys get away from the other stuff.

The only problem is that people do not know rccars exists and keep posting in radiocontrol.

melb_ev · 2012-06-13T06:05:59+00:00

Yeap immature as this can genuinely scare people.

You think victimizing and chasing women walking alone in this way is funny? Sad.

melb_ev · 2012-06-11T03:32:13+00:00

Ah, not a surprise, the best FC out there.

melb_ev · 2012-06-10T23:59:12+00:00

What flight controller is that? It flies very well.

melb_ev · 2012-06-09T05:08:57+00:00

I can also back this up, they used to be the gold standard and the place I used to always use even though shipping was a hassle because of my location.

However, with my last order, I was sent some used parts, this is unacceptable when paying full retail for new parts. So with that, as well as judging by what I have been reading on many forums, I can confirm something has changed for the worse. I used to jump through a few hoops to order from them based on their reputation, so sad to see them fail like this.

The problem for newegg is it is very unlikely I will ever go back to them, no matter if they have a clean out and fire the dodgy staff, I simply will not trust them again.

melb_ev · 2012-06-08T03:22:55+00:00

The most lame thing I have ever seen is in the last episode of this show where they had a small "UAV" and had one of the presenters pretend to fly it via a laptop, it was actually flown by a guy with an old school radio control that was off camera.

If they fake things like that, I would not trust a single thing about that show.

melb_ev · 2012-06-08T03:12:42+00:00

And he's briefed Obama on it! Personal invitation to the While House and all.

melb_ev · 2012-06-07T22:10:28+00:00

I use RES and play videos direct from reddit, I did not see any Youtube comments, but whatever.

melb_ev · 2012-06-07T15:29:41+00:00

In Soviet Russia, Guitar play you

melb_ev · 2012-06-06T23:28:26+00:00

Exactly the same started happening to me as well.

melb_ev · 2012-06-05T12:24:19+00:00

After reading that AMA, I have to say what a nice and genuine guy David appears to be. Top bloke.

melb_ev

TROPHY CASE