The Cube Pixhawk 2 Autopilot and Flight Controller Explained - All Versions Carrier Boards

[@rolandog6388]

It's great to see such detailed videos on this topic still being produced. Thank you for doing the research and also for sharing it!

[@mountaindewdude76]

I've just recently been told that the Cube and Ardupilot are something that I need to look into for a future project. This video was chocked full of info that I found inciteful and educational. Thank you very much!

[@Minecraft1iggy2]

I'd absolutely love a similar video on the Holybro Pixhawk 4. I've used it somewhat extensively, but this format is so informative I'm sure I'd learn something

[@washish1000]

Thanks a lot for the hard work. This is exactly what I needed! Clears up a lot of my doubts. It would be great if you could link to the various carrier boards, power supplies, GPS etc and the sources where you got the information about the various Cube versions from, if possible. Thanks once again, and please continue make such videos!

[@FPVREVIEWS]

Same conclusions i reached from reading the specs. Will be putting one in for testing soon, on new dev. prototype.

[@mountaindewdude76]

You have a new prototype project? I am anxious to hear about this!

[@spartan3299]

Smaller? Faster?

[@FPVREVIEWS]

larger, faster, and also slower at low end of airspeed range. More modular so that transport is easy, and it can be taken on commercial flights. Also so shipping can be less. @@spartan3299

[@spartan3299]

FPVREVIEW Sounds great, I am working on something I can pull over and have in the air in minutes.

[@FPVREVIEWS]

Plenty of small, simple airframes out there, some of them are pretty good. Some not so much. What configuration are you planning on using? @@spartan3299

[@catslovedogs74]

I would like to see a list of the 20 or so carrier boards that were verbally referenced.... I am in the market for a few and want to know all my options.

[@AlexJoneses]

Painless and you are God's amongst men

[@ali_mammadov]

Incredible overview! Great video with very useful information. Subscribed immediately:-)

[@falkenxx]

I need to extend my GPS antenna cable (GPS1 port on carrier board) but I cannot find the name or specs on those connectors. Do you know what they are called and where one might find the male and female mating connectors so one could build an extension cable?

[@dgb5820]

Great video really appreciate your knowledge base, especially explaining the history and future of this technology, how good is it to watch a positive video production

[@tudole]

Thank you for putting this together!

[@michaellane8594]

Extremely helpful and very much appreciated!

[@MadRC]

You're very welcome!

[@digitalalarmsystemsllc4022]

I am currently working on a new build can you tell me if i am using this T Motor U15Ⅱ KV80 and ESC FLAME 200A 14S that this is the flight controller I will be needing to complete this and will a need any additional power modules for the motors and ESC Thanks EDwin

[@omidhsd]

what is open solo and the green cube? I don't understand.

[@electroniceruption9665]

Can we use cube for manned drones like the drone made in africa

[@kenmcnaughton5882]

Hi I am looking at Cube V2 for a scale helicopter i am building. this heli is four blade rotor and would normally require a flybarless gyro. Does the cube take care of the rotor head stability, or do I need a gyro as well?

[@supercobrapro7470]

Can i use this pixhawk 2 for my planned multimotor mentioned down below

[@FinnJohnsonAJ]

Thank you for making this, the information you are providing, I think, is crucial to the development of future UAV technologies. I am 19 and have started a business in which I currently film wedding and do video gigs, my goal is to use the money I make to develop UAV's and do truly groundbreaking work in the field of UAV's. Your channel is a wealth of information that I believe not many institutions of higher learning offer, and the ones that do offer programs in unmanned vehicles are hard to judge from the outside in. ( From the perspective of someone interested in taking the college level courses but is not sure of what exactly the classes teach) Any who I got payed from my first wedding gig, and am using the money to build an octocopter capable of carrying a large LED underneath it, I was torn between the simplicity of going with a Naza V2 as I have built a F550 with that FC before, or going with Pixhawk and learning the ins and outs of what will, I believe, provide essential services to thousands of industries in the future. The information you provided in this video helped me get over the fear of choosing "the wrong" Pixhawk version, Paralysis of the analysis, if you will. If you haven't seen the 1000W LED Drone video I highly recommend it, was a real inspiration to me, hopefully more people will see it kzbin.info/www/bejne/fZ2UqYyvfNSgZ8k

[@joancristianpadro3328]

Dear, I got a Cube Green and I want to use it in a fixed wing drone, not in a Solo. Can I do it, or the Green cube is strictly usable in a Solo? Thanks for your classes!!!

[@franciscourena5636]

I know the basic installation such as Servo, ESC, motor, battery and transmitter, control circuit board However, I don't know how to install the PixHawk system Can you show us steps by steps

[@julesh7353]

Can you use Mission planner on Windows via Parallels via OSX?

[@michaelspring8237]

i want to run a larger ship with on of this carrier boards, ill connect in to the herelink controller. i have 10 channels to cover. what carrier would you recommend?

[@digitalalarmsystemsllc4022]

The flight controller I am wanting to use is the one from Specktreworks Multirotor carrier board

[@08halit]

what about the pixhack v5 commpared to the cube,,as i understand the puter in the v5 is better model then the cube with higher mhz in calculations.

[@MadRC]

The Pichavk V5 is using the F7 CPU so the same as the Yellow Version of the Cube. while it may be a little faster than the Black Cube you don't need that speed as the move to ChibiOS means Ardupilot will run better as it is. The biggest things to consider is the Pixhack may be a good controller but its a unit with little to no real support or backup info, iv struggled to get any real info on its internals and its very unknown. When your putting any real money in the air you need to know the controller is going to work as intended and the guys at Hex and ProfiCNC will give you all the help, support and info there is and its a very solid controller. Its very hard to compare any of the mass produced Chinese build versions of Pixhawk to the Cube as it really is in a different league.

[@08halit]

@@MadRC ,,this was a really helpfull comment you gave me,,im thankfull, im to build my 1st hexacopter and i wish these guys had made a board like the one for hexa also,,i asked about processing power because i want to use external sencors like Adafruit BMP388 Alt/barometer,,Optical Flow Sensor Smart Camera for PX4 PIXHAWK Flight Control System W/ Sonar,,Grove - 80cm Infrared Proximity Sensor,,or similar stuff...what im trying to tell is that i want to build a hexa close to being crash proof and have an immense stabillity in air for filming and also to be able to send it lets say home to my brother that lives 10km away to give him a package of cigarettes,(as an example ) my main goal is to build a very stable drone for filming,,right now im to learn specs on each of the parts available,,and il tell you its like a computer programming school,,new things all the time. so i bet the market will grow explosivelly these 3 to 5 years to come,,this is big bussines as i see it if you have a thing for tech. Thanks for your reply i really presciate it... Also have you seen ppl building drones using Arduino ??

[@danielagar1589]

The CPU in the pixhack v5 (as well as the pixhawk 4 and 4 mini) is an stm32f7. This is a significant jump from the stm32f427 used in the original pixhawk and pixhawk 2. Significantly more memory, and a double precision floating point unit. This is helpful on some setups today, but will become much more interesting in the future when the software starts taking advantage of it.

[@08halit]

@@danielagar1589 could you give an example on how the amount of more memory and specially the "floating points" is going to help me ? as Mad rc says the pixhack v5 doesnt have much info out there but i presume it uses the same program and sys as pixhawk cube.. as i understand is the pixhawk 4 better then the cube as it is now ? and about the floating point unit, does it mean that i can use more sencors or that these sencors will be more "active" ? could you please explain a litle more about these things,,im a layman (noobie) and would presciate more input here... thanks

[@danielagar1589]

​@@08halit here's their official site. store.cuav.net They also have schematic on github. github.com/cuav/hardware/tree/master/V5_Autopilot Here's a bit of documentation from Ardupilot (github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/tree/master/libraries/AP_HAL_ChibiOS/hwdef/CUAVv5) and PX4 (docs.px4.io/en/flight_controller/pixhack_v5.html). Open source software projects (like Ardupilot and PX4) evolve to use the currently available hardware. As a developer I can tell you it won't be that long until new features/capabilities are developed that start taking advantage of an F7. In this particular jump (F4 -> F7) there's a more fundamental hardware change (double precision floating point hardware). Code written to use this (eg estimators) might effectively be unusable on an F4 board where these operations are literally 10x slower. Overall, any of these options will get you flying today. If you're interested in following development or want a slightly more future proof option I'd definitely consider an F7 at this point. Given the negligible cost difference personally I've moved on from F4 boards, but I'm also a developer.

[@JeffsTravels]

Excellent video. I am using the commodity product on my rover without problems (2.4.8). Bought on ebay for 71 usd with cables. Paired with Ardusimple GPS it does the job well. Support is non-existent from the ebay seller. I am interested to know if the purple cube has the heater because that would help in the winter even on the ground with a rover. The proficnc website is hard to navigate and find details, and the information on the site is out of date. They are still showing the Intel Edison products front and center when they were discontinued in June 2017. I think a carrier board which integrated a ZED-F9P as a Raspberry Pi Hat would be a killer product for applications that are not weight sensitive like rovers and boats.

[@MadRC]

As far as I know no it’s not heated on Purple model as it’s just got the IMU on the base board.

[@johncarr123]

Thank you for this review

[@octavianminescu]

Can you tell me please if the pixhawk 2.1 the cube works with the DJI digital FPV system. Controlled through the DJI remote.

[@MadRC]

Yes you can connect to Sbus however Ardupilot does not support MSP for the telem and the Air Unit does not support Mavlink. There has been some Arduino code to transcode this but I have not looked into it yet. It’s on my todo Lindt.

[@supercobrapro7470]

Hey there! You're videos are always helpful to me. Could you please recommend me a flight controller and PDB I'm planning to use 6 Hobbywing X8 motors with 40mm props for my 6axis filming drone and it's going to be hybrid.

[@amortalbeing]

Is it still the best one in 2022? (both for Px4 and Ardupilot?) compared to the CVAV V5+ for example how does it fare? Thanks a lot in advance

[@MadRC]

I think this is a topic for a video.

[@amortalbeing]

@@MadRC It'd be great if you had the time. any way I'm very grateful for all of your contents. Please keep up the great work.

[@NicksMind21]

I know this video is old. But there was a version of ArduPilot that used to run on top of PX4? I thought PX4 and ArduPilot are two different development communities and that PX4 was a fork of ArduPilot. Do I have this wrong? Great video, did learn a lot. Thank you

[@MadRC]

Not so much on top of PX4 but NuttX. NuttX was the middleware that’s Ardupilot ran on and was part of the PX4 project. So basically you had the HAL-NuttX - Ardupilot or in PX4 you had HAL-NuttX - PX4. However some years back Ardupilot moved away from NuttX and onto ChibIOS, this was to allow them more freedom in the development and improved performance overall.

[@sobinlee4580]

it's a great video to learn but i have a doubt it might seems to be silly but i'm expecting some reasonable or valid ans for it The question is why there is a need for 2 gps ports and also i have seen 3 gps in naza A3 pro version it that for secondary purpose like if 1st port fail the second port can be used...? or it has some other spec or feature.....?

[@MadRC]

It can be used for backup, duel GPS for redundancy or for Blending mode that helps give even more backup.

[@theroc495]

Being new to fpv, although I've been flying rc for a couple of decades now, I've purchased a pixhawk cube with here2 gps for my mini talon build I'm starting...trying to decide on an OSD that is very good with the pixhawk and cost is no issue...can you recommend an OSD that is great for the pixhawk cube?? I could really use your opinion on this

[@garretrees7316]

Fantastic video. Thank you.

[@enochst.1328]

Can the cube be used for helicopters?

[@MadRC]

Yea absolutely, Arducopter is designed for Multirotor and Single Rotor as well.

[@markgiles8527]

Where are Dronee Pilot carrier board available? Thanks.

[@MadRC]

Its available here dronee.aero/pages/pilot Sorry for the delay.

[@franciscourena5636]

Great job

[@nivasylstrongman4352]

Dear sir: i am new to this drone Hobby. I have ordered the Skywalker x8 and i wanted it to have all the function that the Parrot disco drone has and a bit more. so, a friend told, instead of the Pixhawk Cube, he install the parrot disco chuck Integrated FPV autopilot system in his Skywalker x8, because it has everything the Pixhawk Cube has and including capability of integrating 4G LTE and real time Google Map, GPS location. and it's only $500. Dear Mad RC: please tell me why the Pixhawk Cube would be a better buy.

[@djajsmvjs4195]

Thank you...Thank you

[@michaelkaplan604]

Thank you...Thank you...

[@amitrana9702]

and men led not working

[@ebjamville]

Thanks

[@captainslow4184]

All good but the price is just too high. It's look like very well designed but in the end it has its cost and I really don't sure that it will perform much better than lats say Matek 405 with ardupilot flash. Nice video

[@MadRC]

I don’t agree it’s too expensive it’s a fine controller backed up with very good support, that adds cost sadly but when your carrying thousands of pounds or dollars of payloads you need to know the controller is good.

[@08halit]

i have my eyes on tarot chasies on the larger 690 -960 size hexacopters..im close to chose the motors,battery and esc,gimbal,sender/receiver. have yet to chose video recorder/live sender,cam and telemetry ?. would like to have propposals on godies i can buy for my build,, prob gona be a tarot 810-960 or x4 Also i can recommend this site for you that is to build. ecalc.ch/xcoptercalc.php

[@BitterCynical]

Calling something "the cube" is very dumb due to search engines. Finding information regarding pixhawk is easy because it won't ever get used to refer to anything other than the open source drone flight controller project.