[WillD]

I've been rooting for Libre Pilot since I bought my Revo Nano and shortly after OP imploded. After reading through a lot of posts, it seems a lot of people are trying to blame the LP software for cheap hardware issues. Being there's no official suppliers for Revolutions or Sparky2's, is there any plans to design an official LP board? I'd hate to see LP suffer from a lack of consistently good hardware. I was going to get one of the "Revos" for another build, but I'm almost afraid to seeing as it's a crapshoot in terms of quality.

[Mateusz]

Making new hardware is a considerable effort, while there are plenty of boards on the market which are really good.
Despite Spark2 and Falcon (seen as Nano) is available in certified stores and high quality hardware, people just buy clones. If you make new hardware for whatever reason, it gets immediately cloned (see Sparky2 clones/Revo clones), people buy it and come here for help. I guess dealing with cheap clones is inevitable when you want to be open-source. People would preferably like to have boards free and software free There are very few people who want to spend nights and days designing something, that gets cloned immediately, while there are really good designs available. I believe (not speaking for LP but personal opinion) that this project wants to utilize existing hardware and write great software. There is still plenty of RAM and flash space on STM32F405 for new features. Unless someone is interested in eating CPU cycles just to stupidly oversample and marketing, there is still huge amount of horse-power to add new exciting stuff

[WillD]

I was not aware the Sparky2 was still available through non-cloners. I'll have to dig deeper. Google only ever comes up with banggood or ebay. I'll also have to check out the Falcon, thanks.

[Mateusz]

Certified Sparky2 for ~$89 and Falcon ~$76 (prices at the moment of writing) is quite a lot compared to clones Sparky2 ~$46 That's almost double.
However, I doubt Revo sold on Banggood is bad at all, most problems I see on forum are solvable and the rest is the users lack of experience, sometimes not reading Wiki or just a bad DIY assembly. Revo is still pretty nice board, it has more flexible Flexi-IO port which Sparky2 does not. That makes Revo a bit more versatile development platform as you can connect more stuff to (despite Sparky2 having more ports). Both offer the same flight performance and for the half of the price if it happens to be bad capacitor, swapping it is not a big deal I think.  I mean, how much capacitor costs There are also newer F3 boards appearing on market and Vladimir (one of devs) got his CC3D with F1 to F3 (Cortex M4 same as F4 series) mcu swapped and flyable, so probably soon those will also be working with LP

[hwh]

I agree with Mateusz. While there are some quality issues with Chinese boards most of them are fine or the problems are easily fixable.  The forums give a distorted impression because for every user with a hardware problem who posts there are probably hundreds of people who didn't post because they didn't have any problem.

For the F3 board support, soon is subject to interpretation.   Don't read that as meaning next week or even next month, it probably means more like next summer. 

[WillD]

Thanks guys, I really liked that falcon board until I saw the price. That's more than I paid for my official nano. So I got a clone and we'll see how that works out.

[TheOtherCliff]

Genuine OP Nano's are being clearanced for $30 shipped (USA only?).
https://sasquatchlabs.org/product/genuine-nano-flight-controller-w-case/ (sasquatchlabs.org web store has closed)

I got one and it is as advertised and it works, but I have not flown it yet.

Sparky2 clone for $36 plus reasonable shipping ($0.93 or $2.23 with tracking).  Good baro power.  The only issue is that the power selector for the RC Rx is supposed to be a solder jumper 5v or 3.3v but not both, and they soldered 10k resistors in both places.  Just put a blob of solder on the 5v jumper and you are good to go.
http://www.xt-xinte.com/F16821.html

[WillD]

Just out of curiosity now, would it be a worth while endeavor to get one of the many revo acro clones and add a barometer and use an external mag on gps? They generally seem to look better put together. FTFQuads has one for $24.50 shipped:
http://www.readytoflyquads.com/openpilot-cc3d-revolution-acro

Also, what about boards that are "revo targets" like the hpyperliteF4 or the Demonrc Soul F4? They should just be hardware derivatives right? They don't have barometers or anywhere to put one, so unless there was a way to add an external barometer, acro would be the only way they'd work if at all. 

[Mateusz]

Hi WillD,

If they have on-board flash for storing config, mpu6000 and exposed I2C bus with the same pins normal Revo uses I see no reason why they wouldn't work as normal Revo, after all it's the same MCU. OpenPilot Revolution ACRO V2 has even place for telemetry module so probably baro is just not populated and should be possible to hook one up there.

I think pins can have multiple purposes on those chips, but once certain feature is enabled it may prevent other pins from serving certain functionality, that's why I think it would be easiest to hook up baro and mag to the same pins as original Revo. But this Acro V2 clone has everything in place, just needs adding baro and mag it seems.

[hwh]

...Also, what about boards that are "revo targets" like the hpyperliteF4 or the Demonrc Soul F4? They should just be hardware derivatives right? They don't have barometers or anywhere to put one, so unless there was a way to add an external barometer, acro would be the only way they'd work if at all.

I don't have one but I think the "acro" boards don't boot with LP because to the firmware it looks like a full board with a broken barometer, oplink, or mag. We don't have a target for the "acro" version.  I think it came up in the developer chat a while back but no one ever really looked into exactly what it would take to support the acro versions or decided whether we should.

[WillD]

So I got my RTF board in Monday (ordered Saturday) and my ebay "Revo" came in today so I hooked them both up to the GCS. The ebay one had no problems connecting and updating to 16.09. The RTF acro v2 wouldn't connect to GCS and I even had a tough time getting cleanflight and raceflight to connect to it. I did the DFU recovery and was able to finally update it to 16.09. Seems to work fine, besides the altitude not working.

[hwh]

So I got my RTF board in Monday (ordered Saturday ... The RTF acro v2 wouldn't connect to GCS and I even had a tough time getting cleanflight and raceflight to connect to it. I did the DFU recovery and was able to finally update it to 16.09. Seems to work fine, besides the altitude not working.

It's normal that it wouldn't connect to GCS when received, they ship all the acro boards with either CF, BF, or RF.

I'd have thought that as long as the ATTI alarm shown in your screenshot is red it wouldn't arm.  I'd guess that the INPUT and OUTPUT ones just mean you haven't configured them yet.  Let us know if it does (or doesn't) arm and fly.  If it doesn't I'll order an acro board after Christmas and take a look at adding some setting to support the acro versions.  It definitely wouldn't go into 16.09 but probably the first 17.xx release.

[WillD]

It's normal that it wouldn't connect to GCS when received, they ship all the acro boards with either CF, BF, or RF.

I'd have thought that as long as the ATTI alarm shown in your screenshot is red it wouldn't arm.  I'd guess that the INPUT and OUTPUT ones just mean you haven't configured them yet.  Let us know if it does (or doesn't) arm and fly.  If it doesn't I'll order an acro board after Christmas and take a look at adding some setting to support the acro versions.  It definitely wouldn't go into 16.09 but probably the first 17.xx release.

I'll see if I can get it flying within the next weeks. I don't have a working Transmitter right now and work is pretty busy.

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

[donnellb]

How stable is 16.09

Sent from my SM-N920T using Tapatalk

[hwh]

Fairly stable, it's the current release. 

https://librepilot.atlassian.net/wiki/display/LPDOC/Downloads