Cleanflight Flight Control Software | Hacker News Reader

Cleanflight Flight Control Software

cleanflight.com

81 pointsCraigJPerry16 comments

Cleanflight is one of many open-source flight controllers widely used in multirotors. Others are Open Pilot (formerly Ardupilot) and derivatives (most notably Tau Labs / Dronin), as well as Betaflight which is a fork of Cleanflight specifically tuned for first-person view flying.

I personally use Betaflight, this is a video of my 180mm quadcopter flying earlier today with the most recent release of Betaflight (2.4.1). The hardest part of using these flight controllers is tuning the PID controller correctly. If you look at my video closely you will notice some oscillations that are the result of less-than-perfect tuning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2aHSakLWZQ

Huh I would have thought they would moved on from PID control by now...

What would succeed PID?

There's some pretty awesome model predictive control out there. Google "Andrew Ng Helicopter" or similar.

If you are into drone racing definitely use the betaflight fork. Out of the box the quad's behaviour is much better.

https://github.com/borisbstyle/betaflight

+10^10^10 betaflight is better

Betaflight is beta, so it has some nice features, but also can be a pain to deal with.

I tend to stay on cleanflight. Features get merged in from betaflight eventually and I don't have to worry about broken builds.

I've never had an issue with broken builds on betaflight, I'm using a 250 racer with a Naze32 if that helps.

From what I hear they don't always merge the changes, hence why lots of people are using Betaflight.

I held back from using betaflight for ages. I finally took the plunge and I haven't looked back. My quad now feels like it is on rails, and it was my first build and it's far from photo worthy.

Install betaflight, you'll love it, take my word for it. And if you don't just go and put Cleandlight back on (this won't happen!)

Hmmm, looks like some license cleanup is needed:

> modified version of StdPeriph function is located here. > TODO - what license does apply here? > original file was lincesed under MCD-ST Liberty SW License Agreement V2 > http://www.st.com/software_license_agreement_liberty_v2

From "ultimate-liberty-v2.txt":

> 4. This software, including modifications and/or derivative works of this software, must execute solely and exclusively on microcontroller or microprocessor devices manufactured by or for STMicroelectronics.

Maybe switch to libopencm3 for basic hardware support?

Yeah, I've seen a number of projects screw up with that library. Some of the StdPeriph library was later released as "Cube" under the 3 clause BSD, so it might be easy to switch to those versions.

I use libopencm3 and it works great, but will be some work to port as all the APIs are different. Too bad no one looked at this in the initial port from Arduino.

Why bother? You only need the ST code to work in ST chips, if you want to port to a different chip you wouldn't use the ST code.

Not sure why this is posted here but Cleanflight is great, it's used extensively on racing drones.

It was posted, I assume, because someone thought it was interesting.

It made it to the front page, I assume, because lots of someones thought it was interesting.

I guess so! It just seems strange to me because it's quite familiar and there's not been any particular release or news that would attract attention suddenly.

Yeah it wasnt a project milestone that prompted me to share the link, it was that I'd just had my first pull request accepted.

I figured it's niche but probably amusing for the crowds here.

Initially I submitted and it got zero votes, yesterday out of the blue I got a ping from the admins inviting me to resubmit and as an experiment they would give it a vote.

It sat with 2 points for a while so I ignored it again. Then I started getting Twitter mentions from various HN bots. I came back and saw it had attracted a bunch of points.

I don't know what the experiment is but the mods promoting a fairly wide of centre article for HN did encourage more votes.

Greate work!

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