Any ideas of choosing Navio2 or Pixhawk

[Beytullah_Durasi (Beytullah Durası)]

Hi All! I am thinking about differences between navio and pixhawk controllers. There is no comparison on internet or I couldn’t find it I think. Can Anyone tell me What is the differences between pix hawk and Navio basically ? Who must choose navio instead of pixhawk ? Any help will appreciate. Thanks.

[george.staroselskiy]

Hello there!

Here’s a pretty good write-up by @CodeChief:

@CodeChief

The main reason I chose a Navio was because the APM trend is “develop till the RAM fills-up then depreciate it”. APM 2 is already obsolete and the Pixhawk is already getting low on memory. Still so many useful features outstanding and the memory is almost depleted.

Looking at 3DR’s direction, following the big DJI, the autopilots are moving to full embedded PCs AND expect another full processor at the ground station/controller.

I saw the PixFalcon and yes for small racing quadcopters it really makes sense as a competitor to Naze and other popular mini boards. It will certainly run for a while, but at which point will the APM developers add so much code that it just doesn’t run on the old (Pixhawk) processor anymore. There are only kilobytes of RAM on that thing.

I know you are talking about driving the PixFalcon with a local connected RasPi for the heavy processing. But that is totally outside the loop and will be limited to MAVLink over a local USB or serial connection.

If people just want that, or something smaller, maybe the Reach and PixFalcon are a better combo (don’t know the price yet though). But I prefer the full capabilities in the smallest package (HAT + RasPi is smaller than PixFalcon + RasPi). Also I’m playing around with getting Windows working with it so I’d prefer to use an autopilot processor board which Microsoft support (really hope they support the Edison).

If Emlid made a Reach+Navio board that would be cool, and VERY small. If Microsoft got Windows running on it I would be even happier. They seem to be pondering it at the moment. Perhaps the next generation Edison would make it.

Anyway, here’s my list of things I prefer about Navio:

• GPS (main chip) included (and cable cheap).
• WiFi capability and other USB device possibilities, can’t do that with PixFalcon.
• Possibility to replace FPV with web cam.
• Wifi also brings the possibility to eliminate the 3DR radio, within limits (that will suffice for many).
• Big enough to support whatever 3DR make for their Solo, so when any PixHawk 2 is released (if 3DR still play together with DIY Drones/open source) then hopefully we are future proofed one generation at least.
• Full speed local access to any of the sensors/ports, for any of your customizations. Possibility to write hooks into HAL source code so back-door to APM also possible.
• All the other free ports and GPIOs of the RasPi.

[iriol]

you can do all the things Navio does that you listed with a Pixhawk and some addons (such as a RPI3) , it all boils down to costs and how much you want to spend…and how much time you willing to spend…I like new tech so I went with Navio2 but also have a couple other birds with Pix…Pix is rock solid…Linux well it can crash (kernel panic)and take out your bird, just FYI

[Corrado_Steri]

Having tried both i would say definitely go with Pixhawk.

Expecially if you need to use some of the new Arducopter supported hardware that takes ages to be supported on Navio and sometimes never does. Also there are some quite big bugs never really solved.

Chronical lateness on supporting new versions of arducopter when released if you don’t want to compile them yourself.

Pretty much everything Navio2 can do, you can do it with a companion computer attached to Pixhawk.

Went to Pixhawk after Navio2 and never looked back.

regards,

Corrado

[Beytullah_Durasi (Beytullah Durası)]

Thanks to everyone for sharing your experiences!

[mikhail.avkhimenia (Mikhail)]

Linux port or ArduPilot appeared just a couple of years ago and had to go through serious development in that time. Previously ArduPilot relied on PX4 middleware for a long time, which provided a lot of additional features and contained some hardware drivers in it, but was running only on microcontrollers. Now, ArduPilot was rewritten to work without PX4 middleware and be fully-featured on all platforms including the ones based on Linux (e.g. Navio2).

When 3.5 is released there will be no difference in regards of support for additional hardware. It is already in rc6 stage, so it will happen really soon.

ArduPilot on Pixhawk is limited by the memory/performance constraints of the microcontroller platform it is built on, developers are always struggling when choosing when features to pack into the new version. On Navio2 there is more control of the ArduPilot and more opportunities for its advancement and close integration with other software packages.

We do release new versions of ArduPilot for Navio2 a week or two later, but that only because we take safety seriously and have to test everything including doing a series of flights to be sure that the new version works fine on Navio2. Sometimes we have to wait for the weather (hey, it rains 126 days per year in Saint Petersburg), but we simply cannot release an untested version to our users.

[Corrado_Steri]

So it looks like all the early adopters had all the bads and from now and on it’ll be all greatness.

Best of luck.

regards,

Corrado