I come from the fpv world, although I built an apm/ardupilot drone a long time ago. I managed to pick up a cube black used off ebay and I’ve found the carrier board to be ridiculous as far as the connectors. I can’t find the power connector anywhere but a few Chinese made kits, and the Holybro one which I assume is chinese made as well.
Can we get a carrier board which has solder pads, or does one exist already so we’re not beholden to 20 cent pieces of plastic to connect our fc’s?
Especially for blue uas operations I can’t see any existing carrier board being an option for that.
Cube Black is pretty old to use in a modern aircraft but there are tens of thousands of Blue UAS aircraft using Cubes.
And if you don’t like the carrier board, you can make your own. That is the whole point of the Cube.
What’s the difference exactly between the black and the oranges h7’s? It looks exactly the same as far as I can see? It’s sort of like a f405 and a f7 I guess in that it’s faster but for practical use it doesn’t really matter? I have mine working I believe except for the battery power which is preventing me from doing a test flight.
China is the only source I can find for the connectors right now, and they’re on holiday, although I finally found out they’re molex/ Chougnar “CLIK-Mate” 2.0mm connectors. So probably originally Molex and knocked off by China. I found some connectors on digikey, but I don’t know if they come precrimped or not which will be a pain in the but. It took me like days to find the chinese seller of the chougnar connectors.
Yes I’m looking at making my own. I’ve done some pcb stuff before. If I can get the designs for the original carrier board I can just replace the connectors with pads it should be easy and cheap.
I find this whole thing completely dumb that I’m having to become an expert on this stuff just to fly though.
I’ve spent about $50 from 3 different sources, 2 of which are on Chinese holiday to just get a connector. It’s a race now to see which source gets me the connector first. $12 for a connector from digikey as well. $6 of which is shipping, when there should be a pcb design with under $20 for this that eliminates these wastes of time and $$$
Connectors are meant for things where you’re changing them out a lot like batteries, not for main power where you’re adding complexity and failure points.
The board designs are in the link above, you would prototype with a standard setup and then create a bespoke carrier board if you were going into mass production. I hear you about failure points lots of that comes from layout and cable management. Most folks might only have one Cube so the ability to use it in many different machines via standard different connectors would be useful for them. The original carrier board had a companion computer in it so that added to the size. The current one has ADS-B IN for free, so you can automatically avoid ADS-B equipped traffic. Lots of things have changed in 10 years.
Yeah the adsb thing is cute, my dji’s have that too but I don’t ever use it since there should never be an instance where you’re in conflict with manned aircraft anyway, you should be able to hear anything flying near you and land and maintain visual los anyway, so unless you’re a super rare pilot with waivers to fly above 400 feet and vlos I don’t see it ever being helpful. It’s just added expense for almost no real world use. RID would be way more useful as part of a carrier board.
