I am in the process of choosing a Flight Controller for our product line.
As this choice will be a critical component of my company’s product line I have a bit different concerns than a researcher/hobbyist.
To me, the following topics are key concerns for long term stability in our product line:
- Standards compliance. If a manufacturer stops manufacturing the hardware, goes bankrupt etc. I need to be able to source hardware that is as close as possible to the original hardware. To me, the most reliable way to do this seems to be to restrict my search to standards compliant Flight Controllers. At the moment this seems like it would be FMUv5 compliant devices.
- Manufacturer should be able to, at least to some extent, document what tests and quality assurance tests they run on their Flight Controllers.
These points are my nice to haves:
- Good internal vibration damping for sensors
- Temperature compensation on sensors
- Possible to use without using 2.5mm pin-headers, as these are unreliable and have a tendency to fall out at the worst possible moment.
- Even better: autopilot-as-a-module design: eg. CUAV Cube, Holybro Pix32 v5 and others with board-to-board connector
Concrete questions:
Q1: The only Flight Controller I am able to find that seems to be fully standards compliant to FMUv5 seems to be the Holybro Pixhawk 4. Is this correct?
Q2: A module that seems like it fits my bill would be the Holybro Pix32 v5, but it is unclear to me if it is really a full FMUv5 implementation or just really close.
Q3: Does anyone know if the 100-pin connector on the Holybro Pix32 v5 is some sort of standard or if it is specific to this Flight Controller?
Q4: I have seen some power-point presentations (LINK) talking about an FMUv5x, this revision seems to address a lot of my concerns. Is there any word on how far away the FMUv5x is?
Q5: CUAV seems to be selling a lot of high quality Flight Controllers, but none of them seem to be standards compliant to a specific FMU-version. Is this correct?