Intel Edison or Arduino DUE

[setishock]

I'm stuck somewhat. The Edison has amazing horse power and storage. But the expansion board only has 4 PWM pins.
The DUE on the other hand has 12 PWM pins and has 50 additional Pins that can be programmed.

Both can be programmed in C++, among other languages. The Edison however has a bastard version of the Linux OS running on it. The DUE comes preloaded with a boot loader and that is all.

I'm leaning toward the DUE simply because you can slave another Arduino to it. What I'm wanting to do is have the DUE do all the heavy lifting while the slave operates the LCD display.
The master would have status and error events that will have a number attached to it. When the event occurs, the number would be sent to the slave which has the text of the event with the number in its memory. When the slave matches the numbers up, the text of the event gets displayed on the LCD screen.
No more having to figure out what that RGB blinking LED is trying to tell you.

I'm also favoring the DUE because it's lighter than the Edison with its expansion board. For 109usd for the Edison and 49.95 for the DUE, The DUE price is an excellent bang for the buck.

I'm designing my own flight controller. Comments or suggestions?

 

[setishock]

Does any one know about these things or is it I managed to piss every one off?

 

[cb600fshornet]

I haven't even heard about them mate, but if it's for a flight controller, and the DUE is smaller and lighter (yet will still do what you want it to), then I'd personally pick that one!

 

[setishock]

Ok then let me toss up some links so you can see what they are.

First the Arduino DUE ( the master )
Arduino Due - assembled [Due] ID: 1076 - $49.95 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits
Next the Arduino Boarduino ( the slave )
DC Boarduino (Arduino compatible) Kit (w/ATmega328) [v1.0] ID: 72 - $17.50 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits
Now the Edison with Ardunino break out board
Intel® Edison Kit w/ Arduino Breakout Board ID: 2180 - $109.95 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits

The master will do all the heavy lifting as in processing the sensors and controlling the motor speed controllers. That includes the IMU ( gyro, accelerometer, altimeter, compass, GPU ). As events occur they will have a number attached to them and fed to the slave. And on top of that several of the flavors of the LCD display have RGB back lighting so use that to not only punctuate the message, you can use it to indicate events such as lighting the back light in red to show a low battery status. Even though your platform may be too far away to see the text, the color could be seen.

The slave will have text messages that have the numbers also attached to them. When the slave matches up the numbers, it displays the message on an LCD display. And logs them for future reference. No more having to figure out what that blinky LED is trying to convey. You'll have it in plain text.

Since the DUE has 12 PWM ports (Whereas the Edison only has 4 ) I'll be able to not only fly a quad, hex, or octo, I'll be able to control a gimbal as well. And with it's extra GPIOs, I'll be able to configure FAA style lighting.

I'm thinking of putting all this on a 6 rotor (hex) as it will have the lift capacity to handle all the extra weight. Put the added bonus of being able to land gracefully if one of the rotors craps out.

There is a young man who did something like this but he had too many devices in the connection link and had terrible lag. He used an app on his phone as the controller. From what I saw in the videos, he had the phone linked to a laptop. Then the laptop fed the data to a Arduino UNO with an Xbee transceiver. That in turn talked to another Xbee tied to the UNO controlling the platform. The sensors in the phone controlled the direction while the app had a throttle and a software on/off switch. It would be ok if the phone spoke directly to the UNO on the platform instead of having to jump through so many hoops.

I'm NOT going that route. I'm going to be using a Spektrum AR8000 as the link to the onboard controller. Since I have a DX7s and a DX9 transmitters, off the shelf to me is the way to go. And using OTS hardware not only is the radio range better, but programming in the transmitter will be able fine tune the platform. Otherwise tweaking the program would be required.

So this is where I am with the project. Planning and procurement stage. I'm taking it slow as there's going to be a lot of time and money tied up. Getting in a hurry can only lead to a disaster.

Comments or questions are welcome.

 

[setishock]

Guess I need to find a Arduino forum to hang out at.

 

[root]

Was just Mia for a few days,

Why not drive the LCD with spi? It's a 1 wire bus.


How are you getting on with this?
(An arduino forum might have more answers quicker!)

 

[setishock]

Well the DUE is out of stock so I went with an Arduino UNO R3. I've started a thread at my MR forum. Arduino goodness

I'm thinking they not come back in stock till January so I'm making a flight controller testing jig. Needing to round up some 3x8 pin female plugs that will fit the pin array on the radio receiver and the flight controller. Pololu has just what I need but doen't seem to carry shrink boot while Adafruit has the shrink boot but doesn't carry the headers I want. Always some thing to muck the plan.

 

[root]

if the pin headers are next to each other, (like a continuous block) then the heat shrink boots push the pins apart to greater than 3/8.

(so I have several boards with different arrangements for UART, hence my serial converter has separate pins all booted independently... no the pins have to fan out to fit the cables... when the shrink thickness is 1/32, then the pin spacing changes from 3/8 to 7/16.