I’m using my HK AIO MegaPirate (Crius clone) board since a few months and I am already very happy with it. The problem with this board is, that I cant get the newest official ArduCopter firmware and I must wait until the developer “SirAlex” port his version of it (MegaPirateNG) to the HK AIO board. The official or clone APM (HKPilot Mega) was not an option. As I saw that the developing of the ArduCopter firmware was going on and on and the APM will not be able to use all the functionality of the coming firmware updates, I decided to go for the PX4 open source board.
This 32bit board is on the market for a half a year thanks to the team of 3DRobotics. You can buy the Pixhawk controller from this page for about 199 $. As I know you get a free support for their products, so if you have problems, you can easily contact their team. That is the benefit buying from them (and the quality of the product… and the case looks very good in my opinion).
But as many people don’t have such amount of money only for the flight controller it becomes a problem. I thought I can order an RTFHawk from witespyquad, but there are big time issues.
And the solution for me came today: Hobbyking has announced their version of the PX4 open source board – HK Pilot32 (I cant name it clone, as the PX4 board is a open source project). The price is about 145 $, for platinum members 136 $ (RTFHawk about 127 $). In my opinion it is fair enough. You don’t get the professional support from 3DRobotics, but save a bit money. I cant say anything about the quality of production until it comes to me, but HobbyKing has never disappointed me so far.
So everyone should decide for himself and most important: you CAN take a decision as there is competition. I ordered mine already 😉
Update 11.08.2014: The HK Pilot32 arrived today. Photos and first impressions here.
Update 15.09.2014: There is also another board based on the PX4 open source project – the AUAV-X2 by Nikolay Arsov. It it smaller and have some nice features compared to the Pixhawk. More in my article about it here (for now only in german, but you can use google translate).
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