Other flight controllers

[hsamuels]

I’ve been using the KK Mini, which is nice and easy to set up with its buttons and display. And the performance is fine, as far as I can tell, with the latest and greatest Steveis 1.19S1 Pro. After a flight yesterday, I found myself presented with an, um, opportunity to get a new flight controller.

Have you used other controllers? Multiwii, Naze32, others? I can see adding a camera gimbal, and maybe a GPS for position hold and RTH, in the near future.

[Terje]

I presently use the Naze32 clone Flip32+ with Cleanflight 1.6.0 on my mini tricopter and am pretty impressed. I plan to put it on the full size frame also (the coming weekend).

It is supposed to support GPS and bluetooth so I have ordered these additonal components as well. Not sure I am going to use them though. I am going to fit one of these controllers on one of my fixed wing models (which are supported in Cleanflight) as well to see if it will enable me to fly in strong winds 🙂

[hsamuels]

Cool! I was looking at a Naze32 clone as well. It includes the metal-cased barometer and a magnetometer.

The two boards look about the same in terms of spec, so it may take a little bit of digging to find any differences (besides price)!

The tricopter option has all the motors spinning the same direction. Can you change that so the front motors spin opposite, with the outside sweeps of the blades moving forwards?

[Terje]

I like the pin placement on the Flip32+ boards that’s why I stick with them. Plus they are pretty cheap. Yes you can absolutely change the direction of the propellers. That is how mine are setup. No change needed on the board. Actually I found myself one ccw propeller short so I changed the rotation of the tail motor by swapping the leads of the ESC. It made no difference what so ever to the flight performance. I assume the yaw stabilazation solely comes from the tail servo?

[hsamuels]

Oh, good point! I was wondering about doing exactly that if I were to run out of one flavor prop.

It feels like the front rotors would behave quite differently under fast forward flight, depending on the rotation. One of the outside blades is moving much faster than the other, which would probably make some roll. So I think that’s the reason for those occasional small values in seemingly unrelated mixes are in the mixer editor.

[Robert C]

Luckily you can change out the props, because I literally only seem to break right-hand props.

What is the best way for the front left and right motor to spin, in forward flight? Outside sweeping forward makes it really sensitive, but is that desired or not? You can either correct really effective, or it becomes twitchy.

When I rebuilt my tricopter this weekend i accidentally switched front left and right arms, but I doubt with my skills I will notice the difference.

[Terje]

If you want to reverse the rotation direction of your motors without re-soldering, you can load the SimonK-reverse version of the firmware onto your ESCs.

[donnyb]

I was curious if you can use arduino to program the naze32 clone like multiwii. Also I was wondering if this was the board you where talking about. http://www.valuehobby.com/multicopters/control-boards/naza-10dof.html

I seen this board and it looked like a good deal. Reason for all the questions is that I don’t have the Internet on my laptop. I download everything on my phone then drag and drop to the laptop.

[hsamuels]

I think there are several different versions of the board, mostly compatible. Just look for rev5. Some omit the magnetometer and pressure sensor – those are cheaper, and are sometimes called acro or 6DOF. The ones with all the sensors cost a little bit more, and are 10DOF.

I don’t know if you can program them with arduino. But why bother? There are free utilities for Windows. All you need is a micro USB cable.

[Terje]

There are free and open source utilities for Chrome. Windows needs driver, Linux and OSX works out of the box. See Baseflight and Cleanflight 🙂

[hsamuels]

Here’s the user manual for Naze32. It specifically says you can’t use Arduino or other AVR development tools.

http://www.abusemark.com/downloads/naze32_rev3.pdf

It looks like Timecop developed the hardware, and that it has been cloned by several others. The Hobbyking site points out that they pay royalties to him on the units they sell. I suspect that most of the clones do not.

The firmware seems to have also been developed by Timecop, based on the MultiWii 8-bit system.

Full disclosure – I design MEMs accelerometers for a living, and worked on the original Nintendo Wii controller, and also on the ADXL345. The ADXL345 was on the earlier Naze32 boards, but has been replaced by the lower performance (and more importantly, lower cost) MPU6050.

Terje, are cleanflight and the other utilities just programming interfaces for the firmware? You can also get an Android app so you can use your phone to program it if you add a small Bluetooth module. That seems like it would be really handy while adjusting the PID values.

I’m looking forward to trying it out! GPS position hold and return to home are under development (you need a GPS module, of course). And it can drive servos for a gimbal, although it may be a little tricky to set up two servos for the gimbal in addition to the tail servo. If I get to that point, setting up the Naze32 to drive the Super Simple Gimbal (look it up) would be a great thread here, since we are all tricopter fans.

What other controllers are you using? What are their advantages and disadvantages?

[Terje]

The Baseflight/Cleanflight utilities are firmwares you flash to the controller. Cleanflight is a flavor of Baseflight. Afterwards you use the Chrome app Baseflight/Cleanflight to configure the controller.

(One of) the Bluetooth app for Android is called Naze32/Multiwii Configurator by Nicodh.

The recommended bluetooth module is called CRIUS MWC Multiwii.

The bluetooth module is connected to the Serial/UART port.

Connect this way:

GND +5v Rx Tx (Flip32+)

GND +5v Tx Rx (Bluetooth adapter)

Attachments:

1. 

   flip32.jpg
   

[hsamuels]

Thanks! Tinkering with these things is as much fun as flying them!

[hsamuels]

Does anybody know who the developer is? It seems like he is based in Japa. But the web site is in English, with an info page in Japanese (link at the bottom left). And the Japanese doesn’t seem to be written by a native speaker.

http://abusemark.com/store/

[Terje]

There is some drama here, for those who care. Sadly talented people (David excluded of course!) are sometimes also drama queens.

If Dominic Clifton (maintainer of Cleanflight) and “TimeCop” (maintainer of Baseflight and inventor of Naze32) could stop fighting, they could do truly great things together.

[Author]

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