Flight Controllers CC3D Rant

[Tony]

I have just spent the last few hours jacking around the internet trying to find mirrors of the openpilot wiki. Why would I need to look for a mirror? Because the friggin wiki FROM openpilot is shut down. Their forum is shut down. There is nothing helpful, other than firmware, that you can get from those people.

I was trying to plan out some videos for the CC3D that needed to be done, but without being able to do research, I can't do any of it.

What I was trying to search was connecting up the bluetooth adapter that I had lying around. You can plug and play on an Ikon, but you can't do that on a CC3D. You have to go in and set ports, fire up putty or BT_config and go in and change the baud rate. It states on the mirror site that you can use the CC3D as an FTDI adapter and it does show up in your device manager, but when you try to connect to the bluetooth adapter, you get nothing. NO MODULE FOUND!

With the wiki gone, the forum gone and very little help out there, I think this CC3D is going in the trash. I have fought this damn thing since day 1 and I'm absolutely tired of it. Open source is great until they shut everything down, then it's useless.

So I guess my 250 is out of commission until I can afford a Naze32, which is the next FC I want to try. It really sucks that openpilot would just shut down like this. Just a few months back, their whole site was shut down. Now the site is back up, but that's it.

Oh well, guess it's time to plan other videos.

/rant

 

[Smoggie]

I've had very mixed results with open source software. The investment in time to figure it out always seemed to outweigh the cost saving on the product. Support is by definition reliant on guys doing it 'for fun' and one day they might decide it's not fun anymore. Plus of course it tends to be tech support 'by geeks and for geeks', anyone not happy writing code and getting 'under the hood' of their software need not apply.

The last example i had (Taranis). When i last tried to find out why my i couldn't connect to my PC is was told it was because I was running windows and I should be running Linux... yeah, very helpful It went straight onto eBay, too much like hard work.

 

[Tony]

Something like that I would just install a dual boot of Ubuntu and call it done. What I have here doesn't work on windows, mac or linux.

 

[Stambo]

The last example i had (Taranis). When i last tried to find out why my i couldn't connect to my PC is was told it was because I was running windows and I should be running Linux... yeah, very helpful It went straight onto eBay, too much like hard work.

I had no trouble hooking my Taranis to my windows 7 PC and many other people I know have said the same.
Whoever told you you needed Linux was full of it.

Just remember Tony, that the Naze32 also runs open source firmware but it has several versions being supported by several groups.
Your Naze32 will come flashed with Baseflight but if you have ESCs with the latest BLHeli firmware I think the best option at the moment is Betaflight from BorisB. Next best would be Cleanflight.
I recently installed Betaflight and found it flys great on stock PIDs although I did bump up the RC rates a bit.
It also has an autotune feature that I will test soon, I have heard it works really well.

 

[Smoggie]

I had no trouble hooking my Taranis to my windows 7 PC and many other people I know have said the same.
Whoever told you you needed Linux was full of it.

This was a while ago on an quite early version of the firmware that apparently has quite 'flaky' USB support in windows, it worked on some PC's not on others. The story was that the next firmware would fix it as it had native Windows USB support. I could get it working on my wife's laptop so it wasn't a show stopper but in the end I found the OpenTx interface hard to get to grips with so I stuck with Spektrum. I'm very tempted by the new FrSky X12S Horus. On the X12S FrSky have installed their own bespoke firmware rather than OpenTx, so I'm obviously not the only one who didn't get along with it.

 

[Lee]

Tony, why don't you flash your CC3D with Cleanflight, if you can't get it to work on Open Pilot.

 

[Tony]

I'm going to, and have in the past just to make sure I can go back and forth. I would like to finish the videos on the CC3D for those that have it (and there are a lot) then flash it and see if I can get that working. ,

 

[Lee]

Open Pilot was shut down when the team decided to part ways.
One group went on to do something completely different, but the others have continued to work with CC3D.
They are working on a new GCS with renewed support for CC3D, unlike the latest version of OP GCS.
Here is the forum for LIBREPILOT, and an explanation of what happened.
https://forum.librepilot.org/index.php?topic=6.0

 

[Tony]

Right on. Lets hope they can pull something off and get back into coding this FC. Thanks for the link.

 

[Rbei312]

I was using the CC3D when I first started flying quads. When they closed the wiki I left them and didn't look back. Right now I have 3 quads all flying SPracingF3's running betaflight and they all fly awesome. I have 2 CCD's hanging on the wall in the shop. Was going to try flashing them with clean flight sometime and see how they work.

 

[Tony]

Cleanflight works surprisingly good on the CC3D, at least from the limited testing that I did with mine. And yes, once they closed the wiki, it was all over for them. There are just too many competitors out there to do something so selfish (as stated in the story behind why they closed it).