Replacement for the DEVO series for the future

FS-i6s is unsuitable for Deviation, unfortunately. It uses STM32F072VB as the main CPU - it's Cortex-M0 with 128KB ROM. It's as limited and as problematic as Devo 7E. Also it does not have SPI flash as far as I can tell - no place to store models and settings.

Hi!

Interesting work, will follow your blog! and flysky looks like a nice TX, although without trims not sure if can get used to that, especially for dialing in new planes.....

There is the touchscreen. And also these two dials on the back. Will need some clever ui but should be doable.

I see you also made an alternative firmware for the D4R-2 with sbus interesting......
Deviation also has the X protocol reversed, I am wondering why all clones uses D protocol?
I thought X protocol has better range, lower latency, more channels better telemetry?

I only have D-series stuff. So this is why i used that
I think that there is no lower latency. You have 9ms (+some us for uart) latency on D protocol when you use sbus. It looks different for ppm.

victzh wrote: FS-i6s is unsuitable for Deviation, unfortunately. It uses STM32F072VB as the main CPU - it's Cortex-M0 with 128KB ROM. It's as limited and as problematic as Devo 7E. Also it does not have SPI flash as far as I can tell - no place to store models and settings.

I am not familiar with deviation, why does it need so much memory? 128k is a lot...

For storing settings: The STM32 can read/write its flash memory in small portions. For more settings it should be very easy to attach e.g. an I2C eeprom, the i2c pads are labeled on the pcb

Deviation is a large piece of software. It barely fits in 128K (actually less, bootloader takes some space). It also uses piece of RAM to dynamically load protocol code - otherwise it does not fit. There is a topic on this forum about saving Devo 7E - Deviation stops to fit it.

This one is really interesting Frsky X12S, not sure if deviation can support this one in the future.

I am using a Devo 7e with Deviation and a Taranis with OpenTX. Both with Multimodule.

Taranis has the bigger screen so the GUI is better.

But protocol support of Deviation is far superior technically.
The protocol code of OpenTX is on the tx module, so it is hard to maintain and develop.
It just makes everything unneccessary complex.

Looking at my old analog transmitters that I dont use anymore the following project comes to mind:
- Design a board that has microcontroller with analog/digital inputs and bluetooth low energy on it. (e.g. NRF51)
- Connect a multimodule with SPI to it. It may be embedded on the board later.
- Glue a smartphone on the transmitter. Later you might design your own case.
- Write an (Android-) app with transmitter GUI and let it connect via BLE.

What do you guys think? I know it requires far more work from a user because he cant just flash an of-the-shelf transmitter.
But it would be cool because with smartphone you get features like maps, voice, fancy graphics, lots of memory, WLAN/LTE, gyro basically for free...

Edit: Picture here: pbs.twimg.com/media/CspO0L_XgAALkd0.jpg:large
This hardware is already enough to fly copters with NRF24L01.

I'm wondering if we can use Android phones/tablet platform.
Plenty of memory?

Ignoring hardware supply, is it possible to interface sticks, switches, RFmodule via USB or headphone jack? what about WiFi, Bluetooth or even cellular network?

I'm not a pro in this field.

No all control loops should run in a standard Arm board with plenty of IO, the phone or tablet is just a GUI, for realtime readout and change settings generate alarms etc, stopping the tablet should keep the control over the model.

Benefit here plenty of features are in in the tablet, speaker, voice command, vibrator, gps, color screen touch input, etc etc.
Opening up for creative developments.

I think anything that requires investment in a smartphone or tablet is a very poor idea. For me, part of the appeal of the Devo TX's, especially the 10 and 7e, is that they are very affordable.

PS: I dislike touch screens (a lot)

The issue with using a phone/tablet is that they're running a real OS with memory protection and task switching, whereas deviation expect to run on bare metal. So not only do you need to deal with what's effectively a different platform, but get proper real time response may be an issue. May not.

Some kind of hybrid system might work: you use a low-end Cortex M3 CPU plus a BLE link to the phone, and push all the UI and file system stuff over to the phone. But it would be a lot of work, possibly more than a port to a phone.

Flysky i6X out soon with maybe a better cpu?

deals.banggood.com/deals/edm/topic/FS-i6...mds=home-top-bBanner

The UI and screen (touch) looks like the FS-i6s

Deviation hardware requirements are simple:
- STM32F103 (can be ported to other architecture, but more complicated) with more than 256K flash ROM
- SPI access to radio module
- graphical screen with more than 128x64 pixels
- external flash with more than 2Mbytes
- USB bootloader for ease of firmware update highly desirable
- soft power off highly desirable

We'll see does FS-i6X have it soon.

I just checked FS-i6 (no X) - it has Kinetis (which is Cortex-M0, not M3 as STM32F103, so no hardware for floating point) with 64KB flash (quarter of what's needed) and i2c EEPROM (unsuitable for Deviation filesystem at all, and can't be easily replaced). It has SPI bus for RF module, which is soldered to the main board.

They seem to beefed up "the memory", whatever it means. If they upgraded MCU to 128KB, I would not bother - it's Devo 7E all over again.

Or the insert of the small universal ARM development board+deviation, just wire up pots and maybe even this display?

Anybody tried this one, someone mentioned before it looks like to be deviation installed on it?

www.banggood.com/Dynam-Detrum-GAVIN-8C-T...ml?rmmds=newArrivals

Nobody knows what's inside really. It's ARM, that's relieving, but there are so many ARM-based TX's absolutely unsuitable for Deviation. If someone who has it willing to take inside photos, we can see.

edit i was remembering the 6ch version, here's the post >> www.deviationtx.com/forum/6-general-disc...-devo-7e-clone#49182

That was 6C as far as I can recall. They could beef up the MCU.

I would like someone start producing small Devo 7E style TX with good build quality. This is harder to compensate for.

yeah i just searched and found the thread and realised my error, i think we would all like a better quality with more mcu power version of a 7e size transmitter (hence the difficult u7e upgrades) and it would be great if someone could find a contact to one of these chinese manufacturers, i mean just look at how well the taranis turned out!