INAV 3.0 is ready for early adopters

Like every six months or so, it’s my great pleasure to give you the next release of INAV flight controller software. The INAV 3.0 is the next major release that brings multiple new features to the table. And this time, both multirotor and fixed-wing pilots will find something interesting for sure.

The full list of changes is very long, so let me just list the ones that I find the most interesting.

GitHub Actions changes to fight cryptocurrency miners

GitHub actions are a great CI/CD setup for every open-source project. Of course, as long, as the project is hosted on GitHub. It turned out, however, that cryptocurrency miners started to take advantage of that and propose abusive pull requests that were mining cryptos using GitHub computing power.

This changed somehow. Yes, if you really, really want to, you can propose a PR that will mine for you, but now, if you are a first time contributor, Actions will not run until someone approves it.

LILYGO T5 4.7-inch E-paper ESP32 development board

One of the biggest advantages of ESP32 development boards (without even counting the speed, flash size, WiFi, Bluetooth, and two cores) is that they come in a variety of shapes and sizes: bare boards, with OLED, with color LCD, with LoRa chipset, with GPS modem, etc., etc. And finally, you can get them with an e-paper display.

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The State of the RC/FPV Hobby Q1 2021 - The results

A few months ago I aske the RC/FPV community a series of questions what they use and how they fly. Today, it is time to announce the results!
In total, I got answers from 1739 people. I will not lie: the number is like 10 times higher I expected it to be. So that you! I appreciate the effort!

Let's go through the question one by one, with a short commentary.

In the last 3 months I've been flying...

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Pirx Seven vs DJI FPV

I designed the Pirx Seven 7-inch FPV frame when the DJI Digital FPV System was something as a novelty. Truth to be told, back then I have not believed it will so popular as it is today. Turned out, I was wrong on that and the DJI Digital FPV System is incredibly popular. Luckily, the Pirx Seven turned out to be future-proof and it accepts both DJI Airt Unit and Caddx Vista without much effort.

How to generate PPM signal with ESP32 and Arduino

The PPM protocol for encoding Remote Control channel values is now a legacy. Still, it is widely accepted by different hardware and when tinkering with Arduino, remote control, and working on own accessories for flight controllers, PPM is still a valid option.

A few years ago I presented a code that allows generating PPM stream using Arduino and AVR hardware. That solution is very hardware-specific and works only with ATMega microcontrollers.

During my work of ESP32 DiyMotionController I stumbled on a problem: if ESP32 is not compatible with AVR when timers are a concern, how to generate a PPM stream on ESP32?

ESP32, Arduino and Timer/Alerts

Because of completely different architecture, ISR and Timer solutions known from other Arduino compatible platforms, especially AVR/ATmega does not work on ESP32. They don't. At all. If you would like to port any code that uses timers from AVR Arduino to ESP32 Arduino, you would have to rewrite them completely.

However, timers and alarms with espressif ESP32 Arduino core are simple. Much simpler than AVR equivalents! No more writing registers with magical numbers.

DIY Drone Gesture Control - DIY Motion Controller

Together with the DJI FPV Drone we, RC and FPV hobby enthusiasts, got a new accessory: DJI Motion Controller.

It does a pretty obvious thing that we know for years from the Nintendo Wii controller: with this device, you get gesture control over your FPV Drone. You tilt it left, drone turns left. You tilt it back, drone gains altitude. You press the index finger "trigger" and the drone goes forward! There are some problems though. First of all, it works only with the DJI FPV Drone. And second of all, it cost an extra $200!

ESP32 and multiple I2C buses

One of the advantages of the ESP32 microcontrollers over the competitions is dual-core architecture and two I2C buses.

Yes, the I2C bus allows connecting multiple slave devices to single pair of SCL SDA wires. As long as slave device addresses are unique, everything will work just fine: OLED display, LM75 temperature sensor, MPU6050 gyroscope. However, one has to remember that one of the devices can be polled at a time. If the bus is used by, for example, MPU6050, parallel communication with SSD1306 OLED display is not possible.

Here comes the advantage of having multiple I2C buses. Not only you can have more devices of the same type and avoid I2C address conflicts, but you can also take full advantage of 2 ESP32 cores and communicate with multiple devices at the same time.

FPV meets corporation - DJI FPV Goggles V2 vs V1 and availability

Why can't I buy DJI goggles anymore

All of you who tried to buy FPV goggles in the last three months might have noticed that it was not a trivial endeavor. Starting from the last December, the DJI Goggles and Air Units and Caddx Vistas availability was limited. To some extent, it was due to increased demand just before Christmas and so some, because V1 goggles production ended a few months ago and what we were getting on the market were units produced probably in the Q2-Q3 of 2020.

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