062 FT Extra & BrainFPV Interview

I'm all for doing things myself and doing them cheaply. I built my first quad on a $100 budget by making my own MW control board from an arduino and taking sensors out of my Wii controller :) ( http://flitetest.com/articles/ultra-budget-knuckle-build )

I went on to add GPS and osd with a minimOSD board. And it all works. But it doesn't work nearly as well as the Tau stuff does. And Tau is fully open source as well so I was also able to build my own Tau based controller. But it sure doesn't fit in a 36x36mm package and doesn't include the OSD ;) It flies great though and it's GPS abilities blow MW and Cleanflight out of the water. It did only cost me $15 for the dev board and I re-used the sensors from my old MW build (but I'm only running about $25 worth of sensors with the MPU-6050 gryo/accel, old BMP085 baro and the standard HMC5883 mag.) Even then for about the same price you could pick up a Sparky board from RTFQ with the better baro sensor...except RTFQ is using parts of questionable quality and the better baro sensor on most of their boards is giving worse results than my old less accurate sensor as a result.

Since Tau is open source you could also always build your own, I priced it out and the Sparky boards could be built for around $40-$50 each if you build 6 of them using parts source from reputable vendors. The brain board has a larger more expensive processor than the Sparky (The F4 chip instead of the F3 used on the Sparky - both of which are bigger and better (faster, more memory, more ports) than the F1 chip used on the Naze32) and extra components for the additional I/O and OSD functions. Brain hasn't released their design yet (though Martin has said he eventually does plan to release it - and his changes to to software/firmware are open source and available on github already) but based on having priced out a Sparky board and what's different on the Brain I don't think he's making very much profit on them at his price point. The components aren't cheap and neither are quality PCB's - and assembly.

I'd love to see FT do an episode on adding OSD to Naze/MW - but having done it it's not all that simple to get it going well. Documentation is horrible and there are a few gotchas on setting up the minimosd that can throw even an experienced builder/tinkerer for a loop. And even then it doesn't respond as fast or smooth and doesn't look nearly as good as what the Brain can offer. But on a budget it's certainly a viable option and on my Naze32 powered FPV mini I do love having the OSD to see what my battery is doing, have an arrow pointing me back home, and being able to change my PID/Rate settings through it is great as well (when I can remember the stick commands!)

I love seeing FT branch out and finally covering more advanced flight controllers. Naze is great for acro flying...but when it comes to more advanced functions like GPS - the firmware stinks and the hardware isn't all that great either. In fact my old homebrewed MW had more memory and more serial ports than a Naze32 and getting GPS and OSD up and running on there was much easier as a result. And Naze (even with cleanflight) won't do waypoint nav and is unlikely to due to the lack of available memory on the STM32F1 chip it uses.

Not trying to argue - just trying to bring some additional info to the table as to what the tradeoffs are on a budget system vs. something like the brain.
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