dRonin - No longer just for the brave

[jhitesma]

Yeah, you have to be buying components in large quantity to get them fairly affordably. You get get the sensors and STM chips off aliexpress way cheaper than from digikey/mouser/element14...but...who knows what the quality will be. Sparky2 would be tricky to hand solder, could be done in a toaster oven fairly easily...but wouldn't be a great first project with that size of parts. I still need to finish some re-work on the submicrolrs RX I did in my old toaster oven. Just have to replace one cap I lost and reposition the crystal...but with 6 contact points the crystal is a bit tricky to do without a good hot air station. I've done these things with a $7 embossing gun from the fabric store - but it's tricky because it blows more air than a real re-work station so tends to blow components off if you're not super careful/patient.

 

[jhitesma]

BTW - looks like the neat new feature for the next release made some good headway last night. It's a control reprojection system. The initial use of it is for what they're calling "CATS" which stands for something like Camera Angle Translation System.

Basically it lets you tell the FC how much tilt you're running on your FPV cam - and then it reprojects your control inputs so it still flies as if you were flying with no camera tilt. So even if you're flying crazy camera tilt angles like 60 degrees where yaw starts to become roll it still behaves as if you're flying level and yaw will give you a flat turn.

First guy who tested it yesterday said he loved it, made his crazy tilted quad feel like a plane.

Will be interesting to see how it does. They're building it in a way that it will be able to be used for other control projections but I can't remember the other examples of how it could be useful right now.

I'm hoping the big feature for the release after that will be settings banks. It's something I've missed for a long time and a lot of people trying dRonin are asking for it more and more.

 

[evilmerlin]

Oooh! That's a neat feature!

 

[jhitesma]

First details of the new BrainFPV board just hit the dRonin repo:

https://github.com/d-ronin/dRonin/pull/962

Sounds like the first test batch of boards is out for manufacturing and hshred is trying to get the code finalized before the next dRonin release. Can't wait to see these boards!

 

[Balu]

Me too. And I still haven't used the original Brain... :-o

 

[jhitesma]

Me too. And I still haven't used the original Brain... :-o

The dRonin GCS is MUCH more stable on OSX now Quite a few things that caused crashes before have been identified and eliminated. You should have much better luck now than you did before.

 

[Balu]

Yeah I've reported quite a few of those, but I mostly heard that it was problems with the QT libraries which they couldn't fix.

Really need to start looking into dRonin' but after the big work project that eat up the last 6 months or so, the state of my build area is non-existant. I need to clean that up, find all the tools and set up to get back into working on RC stuff.

 

[jhitesma]

Yeah I've reported quite a few of those, but I mostly heard that it was problems with the QT libraries which they couldn't fix.

Once the dRonin team took a closer look at things they found a bunch of bugs in the low level USB code that they completely revamped. They also updated to a newer version of QT. But the USB stuff made the biggest difference in stability. icee's also been doing a lot of cleanup on the telemetry system which turned out to be pretty horrid and was causing GCS stability - but he's got quite a bit more work to do there before he's happy it sounds like.

 

[evilmerlin]

BrainFPV RE1 details are up.

http://brainfpv.com/re1/

 

[jhitesma]

BrainFPV RE1 details are up.

http://brainfpv.com/re1/

The blog post has more details: http://www.brainfpv.com/hello-world/

Kind of surprised he doesn't mention the FPGA on the main page...only the things it enables I know he put a ton of work into getting the FPGA working, and it really opens a lot of doors for crazy features.

I'm really impressed to see he's putting the MSRP at $80 even with the addition of a FPGA and US based manufacturing. I figured this was going to be in the $100 range again.

I'm sure the bosh sensor will be controversial...but again know he put a lot of time and research into the decision to switch from invensense and am looking forward to flying one.

 

[Richmond2000]

The blog post has more details: http://www.brainfpv.com/hello-world/

Kind of surprised he doesn't mention the FPGA on the main page...only the things it enables I know he put a ton of work into getting the FPGA working, and it really opens a lot of doors for crazy features.

I'm really impressed to see he's putting the MSRP at $80 even with the addition of a FPGA and US based manufacturing. I figured this was going to be in the $100 range again.

I'm sure the bosh sensor will be controversial...but again know he put a lot of time and research into the decision to switch from invensense and am looking forward to flying one.

WOW that thing is SICK in a GOOD way WOW

I have a feeling a LOT of quads are going to get a brain transplant when these are on the street

 

[cranialrectosis]

I have been waiting for the RE1 for a while now. I just this moment saw the mPB.

Remember when we started out soldering our own wiring harness or using HK Bullet PDBs? Then the Afro PDB came out. That was nice upgrade. Then we started seeing nicer PDBs from Lumenier etc....

This is out of the park.

They even got the battery monitor figured out. This combination eliminates half a build's work and all the futzing to get the wiring clean. Then there's autotune and integrated OSD.

The amount of wiring this cleans up is SICK like Richmond2000 says. I just can't describe it any better.

I just hope we don't have to wait until after summer.

 

[jhitesma]

They even got the battery monitor figured out. This combination eliminates half a build's work and all the futzing to get the wiring clean. Then there's autotune and integrated OSD.

Battery monitor...AND power filter

And Power board and RE1 together should be less than the original brain was when it first came out.

The only thing I can really fault it for is the lack of a baro and mag...but I know why he left off the baro (it was a nightmare for the fab shop and caused most of the issues - plus for a racing oriented board it's really not needed and just adds cost while taking up space) and the mag is best mounted elsewhere anyway. It sounds like he's going to do an add-on board that uses the hirose connector to attach baro/mag/gps which makes a lot of sense since only people doing nav will need those and then they'll need all of them.

I also know of some of the testing that's gone into picking the gyro so I have zero problems with that. It's not running at some ridiculous frequency...but I've yet to see any actual data to back up a benefit from that. I don't go in for "finger dynos" (like a butt dyno from the car world) I like data. And data just doesn't back up any actual benefit from going higher on the gyro rates.

Speaking of data...that's something else neat coming from the dronin team soon. As I've mentioned they're huge on data. And the limits of open logger and on-board logging are keeping them from getting the kind of data they want. They're working on a little side project (that's coming along very nicely) that basically does for open logger what Naze32 did for KK2. I won't go into more details but you can find a few more on the dRonin github site if you're curious: https://github.com/d-ronin/openlager

 

[C0d3M0nk3y]

I won't go into more details but you can find a few more on the dRonin github site if you're curious: https://github.com/d-ronin/openlager

I like the name.

 

[Richmond2000]

I have to say this is getting to be exciting times on the hardware front with MANY people pushing NEW and impressive solutions
I like the idea of a daughter board for GPS/autonomous operation and the sound of their high speed datalager

 

[jANjALANi]

I just learned about dRonin about 4 days ago. man i'm impressed. i didn't have to tinker that much to get it going. can't believe why is this not popular yet. here's the gps test i did today

 

[jipp]

i know i tell people about it.. they sure wake up once you mention auto tune.. so its pretty aprent people hate pids heh.
i think the main reason why its not so known is just because the popularity of naze right now.. CC3d has always been treated as a red headed step chiled..

and when you have people like Bruce who has major influence bad talking cc3d any second he gets but its all good my first board was a c3d or i probably would be on the naze hype train my self.. as that is what i would of invested my time learning.. just happen my first kit came with cc3d and open pilot. .. so its not surprising most people see naze as superior.. but i think things are gonna change. especially once cc3d becomes obsolete, along with naze.. and people start pushing f4 boards etc in kits on ebay and other places that sell kits ( happen to the KK boards ).. right now it seems most manufactures of ready to fly quads offer both cc3d or naze or there own version of naze..

so im just glad there are people working on other platforms other than naze.. i looked on the google app store and lots of apps for clean flight etc.. did not see anything for cc3d tho.. which sorta sucks. but i can see why..

chris.

 

[cranialrectosis]

The new RE1 boards are in pre-order today!
https://www.brainfpv.com/re1/

MPB
https://www.brainfpv.com/mpb/

 

[jipp]

thanks for the heads up.. im broke but whatever, i look forward to hearing people results and seeing some builds.. it sure is gonna make a clean quad i think.

chris.

 

[Balu]

Ah, it's nice to see that Dronin GCS still has the same "features", Taulabs GCS had for me.

When I go to Flight data once and go back to Welcome, none of the top buttons work...