Any more news on this Cube model? It seems to be a quiet topic since its announcement. I was wondering if anyone here had some inside info on its development and possible release…
Over the weekend the Cube Red was mentioned and a prototype was (quickly) shown during the Ardupilot Developer Conference. It is using two (2) dual core STM32H757, with the idea that Ardupilot would be installed on each of the M7 cores. It was mentioned that development of Ardupilot to support the dual core processors will be worked on this year, so the M4 processor could also be used.
See this portion of the clip that mentions this: https://youtu.be/yV2HURCENkg?t=1508
2 STM32H757 dual core
Ethernet port on primary H7
External flash on primary H7
3 CAN busses
4 IMUs on primary H7
1 IMU on secondary H7
First carrier board will have two Cube Reds
Initial CubeRed hardware definition files have been uploaded two weeks ago on github ardupilot/libraries/AP_HAL_ChibiOS/hwdef/CubeRedPrimary at master · ArduPilot/ardupilot · GitHub
They are using the following navigation sensors:
RM3100 magnetometer https://www.pnicorp.com/rm3100/ and
RM3100 - Additional devices
ICM-42688 Accelerometer/Gyro
ICM-20649 Accelerometer/gyro
MS5611 altimeter
They are using one hardware profile for the primary controller, and a separate one for the secondary controller, which communicate to each other via a serial port. It does not look like they are using the dual processing capability of the microcontrollers as of yet.
i put this thread up since now the Cube Red is actually avaiable. I’m quite interested in that, but i don’t grasp how the “dual” operation is performed and handled by the Arducopter firmware and what are the control laws of that. Is there any info around?
@Steve the flight control redundancy aspect of Cube Red is still under exploration. Current method of doing something like this would be to use something called standby mode in ArduCopter. If motors are controlled through CAN, this should work without software mods. But if its through PWM, bit more changes will be required, as Primary and Secondary have different PWM outs, there will be a need to tie those together or have redundant motors or have PWM passthrough implementation in Standby.