BLHeli_32 – A New Hope?

[Terje]

Hi guys, it’s been a while. Tricopters have been sitting idle for almost a year, much has happend since then.

New F7 boards with massive increase in processing power and storage, integrated OSDs, camera control and support for DShot1200.

Maybe most importantly BLHeli_32 ESC’s with telemetry (RPM, AMP, Temp etc).

I wonder if it would be possible to harness the new features for a better handling of the tricopters? If you know the thrust of a motor/prop combination at a given RPM, should it not be possible to calculate the angle of the stationary motors in relation to gravity and combine the data with the calculated thrust of the tail motor/prop at a given angle, since the angle in relation to the stationary motors?

[LitterBug]

@dkdarkness,
Although those features would be awesome, the telemetry data rates just aren’t high enough. It’s good info for logging and OSD, but not updated frequently enough to use for the FC to make much use of it for flight calculations. The telemetry is split between the DShot and Telemetry channel. Commands are sent over Dshot to request telemetry, and the telemetry is returned over the telemetry bus. All of the ESCs send telemetry back over a shared bus rather than individual telemetry for each ESC. Things are heading in the right direction, but ideally we need a true digital signal path between the FC and ESCs rather than a hacked PWM signal.

Have you talked @david in to developing a F7FC racing FC yet?

Cheers!
LitterBug

[hertz]

The increase associated with F7 isn’t massive though. I’ve worked hard on making BetaFlight work nicely with F7 and it’s now measurably better than the F4, but there’s not much more to be gained.

The performance of memory subsystem and the FPU is the same for F7 and F4 overclocked to the same frequency, some benefits come from F7 having ITCM-RAM and ITCM-FLASH interfaces for the most critical parts of the code, but it’s still not a major breakthrough.

H7 will have a much bigger benefit, and we’re also looking into using Cortex-A5 dual-core CPUs as the future steps.

[Kevin_Erik]

I’ve been using D-Shot 1200 for the last 2-3 months with no noticeable negative effects. That being said, I’ve not seen any noticable gains from it either. Now as for the telemetry, its a gimic…. Had one of the reps from Matek tell me about as much when i asked for specifics on how best to setup my FC with the new ESC capabilities.

[LitterBug]

The big gain of going to dshot is not needing to do the endpoint calibration. Plug it in and go. Telemetry isn’t a gimmick for logging and analysis, it just isn’t robust enough for control.

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