| Ok, this drives me nuts ARGH! Seriously? The STM32F103? Crazy (or should that be Craze) hobbyists using "blue pill" boards because they are cheap (and they are, like $3 on ebay) which use this bastard chip of the ST Cortex-M line and they say "gee, its a really simple circuit and since they sell for so cheap on ebay it should be a good idea to use this chip!" BZZZZZZT! ST Micro makes much better CPUs that would be ideal for this application, they have things like on board DSP instructions in their floating point units, and can run at internal clock rates of 180 MHz with a megabyte of Flash and 384K of RAM, some of it very high performance (core coupled memory). These CPUs are no harder to put onto a PCB than the STM32F103 and they are so much more capable. And sure, they are $10 apiece instead of $1 apiece which is fine if you're making BILLIONS of these things, but a bespoke quadcopter? Oh but its Open Source, cool, except I can't find the PCB files anywhere, if I could I could pull out that crap chip and put in a real CPU and have OSHPark make me a few. I did find the software repo : https://github.com/Crazepony and yeah, another budget quadcopter maker with a bunch of things they want to sell and an "open source" tag to try to get people to come and look. Fair enough, it made me look. It is sort of the 'freemium' hardware company model. Sigh. I'd love something bigger than the Crazflie[1] which is like real open source (PCB and everything) and smaller than a DJI Phantom that I could play around with. |