Hello everyone,
I hope you are doing great. I’m a newbie and I want to buy a decent FCU for our research. we are planning to use PX4 but may very well end up using Ardupilot later, its not clear at the moment. what is clear is our start will be using PX4.
I have searched a lot and honestly this thing is really confusing. there are lots of models and I have no idea which one to pick.
I recently found this youtube channel, where I get to know several versions, like cubes and non cubes.
As far as I understood, Orange Cube is by far the best thing out there, but it also seems its predominantly used with Ardupilot. Even at the top of this site, it talks about Ardupilot stuff!
So is this exclusive to Ardupilot only? if I use PX4, would this give me headaches?
Also after couple of more searches I found about another cube called CVAU V5. what about this? where does this stand in all of this? how does this fare against Orange Cube? and support of PX4/Ardupilot?
And finally what about the normal Pixhawk4 like 2.4.8? how good is that? which one is the best?
Thanks a lot in advance
The Cube Orange made by CubePilot/Hex uses an STM32H743 MCU. That will have all the latest features and be the most capable MCU on the market right now short of a Linux box running the autopilot.
The other product you mentioned is manufactured by a different company and probably uses an F765 MCU. I’m going off memory on that one because they don’t have it on their website any more. You will not find unbiased opinions about that hardware on this forum.
The autopilot firmware ArduPilot and PX4 both support the H7 based hardware. The recommendation from Cube Pilot lately has been run the latest release version of ArduPilot.
The Pixhawk 2.4.8 or any knockoff version of that hardware are far out of date and are no longer supported. The least capable MCU version supported by ArduPilot for running an autopilot is the STM32F405 (not used in CubePilot autopilot hardware) or F427 (Cube Black that is no longer manufactured). You can browse a full list of support hardware in the ArduPilot docs here. Autopilot Hardware Options — Copter documentation I would also highly recommend that you read the docs as they will answer a lot of questions you might have.
Thanks a lot really appreciate it.
Concerning the Pixhawk 2.4.8, isnt that the latest version of Pixhawk 4 (the reference board)?
When I searched whats the latest version of Pixhawk, google came up with this:
Pixhawk ® 4 is the latest update to the successful family of Pixhawk flight controllers. It is designed and developed in collaboration with Holybro and the PX4 team, optimized to run the full Dronecode stack and comes preinstalled with the latest PX4 firmware (v1.7).
Are Pixhawk 2.4.8 and Pixhawk4 two different things?
(cause looking at this reddit post, which reads pixhawk4 2.4.8, I believed this is the reference board!)
Concerning the Pixhawk 2.4.8, isnt that the latest version of Pixhawk 4 (the reference board)?
When I searched whats the latest version of Pixhawk, google came up with this:
Pixhawk ® 4 is the latest update to the successful family of Pixhawk flight controllers. It is designed and developed in collaboration with Holybro and the PX4 team, optimized to run the full Dronecode stack and comes preinstalled with the latest PX4 firmware (v1.7).
Are Pixhawk 2.4.8 and Pixhawk4 two different things?
(cause looking at this reddit post, which reads pixhawk4 2.4.8, I believed this is the reference board!)
Hi @Master the Cube Orange is supported by the PX4 Autopilot, if you have any issues feel free to post on the PX4 Forums, here’s the list of supported hardware by PX4 https://px4.io/autopilots/
The Pixhawk family of flight controllers has had multiple versions released over the years, Pixhawk 5X is the latest one, before then there was the Pixhawk 4, and a few generations behind you can find the Pixhawk 2, I hope this helps.
Thanks a lot really appreciate your kind and thorough reply.
Yes thats very informative and I guess I got my answer.
one quick question though. Cube seems to be FMU v3 based right? isnt FMU v3 older than FMUv5 and thus not as good? Is there a reason Cube sticks to the FMU v3?
(Also two of my posts were flagged, how can I know why they were flagged?)
Cube Black was mostly FMUv3 based. Cube Orange does not exactly line up with an FMU version just like many other autopilots out on the market. The specifics of the Cube differences can be seen in the documentation. The Cube Module Overview - CubePilot
You can use PX4. I have used it and it works very well. Quit flawless. I olny switch back because I have not learned how to do everything I need it to do but was very happy with it.
