Alright sister mary sunshine... hush yer rainin on my parade of ideas
Well I guess Dronin will be a new step at a later date. I still have to get the parts to start the project before even thinking about what to run on it I guess.
Yeah, SPF3 uses Naze style USB wiring with a CP2102 chip off a serial port instead of using the STM's built in USB support. That makes it impossible to use dRonin's bootloader which makes flashing and upgrading more difficult. There are also a lot of poor quality SPF3 clones, some questionable design choices in the SPF3 itself, and not all of the clones are 100% compatible (sometimes they swap sensors around) so it's not something dRonin wants to support as it's highly likely to create a lot of support issues for the developers. *flight is more forgiving of targest with sensors changed around because their firmware probes the sensors to determine which to use - but that means it needs code to talk to all of those sensors built into the firmware all the time. dRonin on the other hand uses rigidly defined targets so it's code use is more efficient as it only has to build the drivers into that firmware that are actually used. This saves a good bit of space which leaves room for things like autotune and navigation code. It's also a general architecture difference - dRonin in general is more rigidly defined about just about everything. Like how rates are coded as deg/s instead of a an arbitrary multiplier, and how hangtime is part of actuator clipping management which deals with how to react when requesting moves that require more or less motor input than physically possible - while airmode basically just forces the PID controller to stay running when it usually wouldn't.
There has been a bit of talk about adding F3evo support since it did away with the CP2102 chip and uses the F3's native USB allowing the bootloader to work. And the emax femto being based on it is tempting. But...again there's a lot of goofiness with the clones and the developers are focused on the pico blx and polishing up seppuku support right now so another new target isn't likely anytime soon. I've toyed with the idea of trying to make a target for F3evo myself...but...that's a bigger project than I've taken on before and I'm a little short on time right now. My old flyingF4 used custom sensors - which required modifying the default FlyingF4 target...but was really just changing a half dozen lines in the target definition to tell it to use different sensor code - all of the wiring was the same and the sensor drivers were already there. F3evo support would big a bigger project since the wiring is different so I'd have to learn how the F3evo is wired (probably by looking at the betaflight source) and then modify a similar dronin target. I could probably pull it off...but I don't have an F3evo or femto board and don't have funds to get one anytime soon and even if I did have such a big pile of projects already half completed I really don't need another.
Though...I know LitterBug has been talking about dusting off his old C skills and looking for something on dRonin to hack at
Personally I'd rather see him help out with improving GCS and OSD support. But with spring starting I suspect he'll be doing more flying and less hacking for the next few months
(and conversely with summer on the horizon I'll be doing less flying and more hiding in the AC so who knows maybe a coding project will start to sound more interesting to me soon.)
