Pixhawk is stealing my heart.

A while ago, I finished building a 3DR Y6. It flies well enough. I've enjoyed the "Stabilize" flight mode - which is like "attitude" mode on a DJI flight manager but it doesn't try to maintain altitude. It's a much more tactile way to fly - not as nerve-racking and attention demanding as full manual - but a nice compromise between control and automation for aggressive flying.

Now, however, I've gotten into the guts of the system. I bought a little Arduino Uno from www.sparkfun.com and starting digging into the arducopter code. The experience of going from the completely closed DJI flight controller (A2 and Naza) to the completely open and transparent Pixhawk is transformative. It's like the blinders have been removed and all the internal workings laid bare. The effect on my confidence in the aircraft is profound and the level of built in data logging is astounding. It's trivial to create a KML movie of your flight and play it back in Google Earth. You can see exactly where your sticks were at each stage of the flight, how much current was being drawn, the attitude of the aircraft, and about 100 other bits of data.

You can wire your pixhawk into a flight simulator for "hardware in the loop" testing - where the pixhawk is flying your virtual octocopter in RealFlight or X-Plane. The you can start changing arducopter code and see how it affects the flight of your virtual beast. It's fantastic.

It took only a few hours to get the Pixhawk to control a Canon SX260 with a Gentles Gentwire USB 2 cable. With a tiny bit of coding you can set the zoom level of your camera from your transmitter, stow the lens for landing, and setup one of the Pixhawk's PWM capable pins to fire the shutter. This makes the Pixhawk a no-brainer for mapping applications.

The Mission Planner software is intuitive and powerful. Setting up a grid survey with camera shutter control is a (mostly) straight forward process. The telemetry feeds almost make me giddy. You can feed your FPV video right into Mission Planner and display next to your data and map displays. 

I'll have to put together some more specific posts about each of these wonderful items. At the moment, I've got a crush on the Pixhawk. Time will tell if it's justified.