
Cleanflight Flight Control Software - CraigJPerry
http://cleanflight.com
======
diego
Cleanflight is one of many open-source flight controllers widely used in
multirotors. Others are Open Pilot (formerly Ardupilot) and derivatives (most
notably Tau Labs / Dronin), as well as Betaflight which is a fork of
Cleanflight specifically tuned for first-person view flying.

I personally use Betaflight, this is a video of my 180mm quadcopter flying
earlier today with the most recent release of Betaflight (2.4.1). The hardest
part of using these flight controllers is tuning the PID controller correctly.
If you look at my video closely you will notice some oscillations that are the
result of less-than-perfect tuning.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2aHSakLWZQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2aHSakLWZQ)

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IshKebab
Huh I would have thought they would moved on from PID control by now...

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ibn
What would succeed PID?

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IshKebab
There's some pretty awesome model predictive control out there. Google "Andrew
Ng Helicopter" or similar.

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apapli
If you are into drone racing definitely use the betaflight fork. Out of the
box the quad's behaviour is much better.

[https://github.com/borisbstyle/betaflight](https://github.com/borisbstyle/betaflight)

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natvert
+10^10^10 betaflight is better

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LesZedCB
Betaflight is beta, so it has some nice features, but also can be a pain to
deal with.

I tend to stay on cleanflight. Features get merged in from betaflight
eventually and I don't have to worry about broken builds.

~~~
apapli
I've never had an issue with broken builds on betaflight, I'm using a 250
racer with a Naze32 if that helps.

From what I hear they don't always merge the changes, hence why lots of people
are using Betaflight.

I held back from using betaflight for ages. I finally took the plunge and I
haven't looked back. My quad now feels like it is on rails, and it was my
first build and it's far from photo worthy.

Install betaflight, you'll love it, take my word for it. And if you don't just
go and put Cleandlight back on (this won't happen!)

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bnewbold
Hmmm, looks like some license cleanup is needed:

> modified version of StdPeriph function is located here. > TODO - what
> license does apply here? > original file was lincesed under MCD-ST Liberty
> SW License Agreement V2 >
> [http://www.st.com/software_license_agreement_liberty_v2](http://www.st.com/software_license_agreement_liberty_v2)

From "ultimate-liberty-v2.txt":

> 4\. This software, including modifications and/or derivative works of this
> software, must execute solely and exclusively on microcontroller or
> microprocessor devices manufactured by or for STMicroelectronics.

Maybe switch to libopencm3 for basic hardware support?

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TD-Linux
Yeah, I've seen a number of projects screw up with that library. Some of the
StdPeriph library was later released as "Cube" under the 3 clause BSD, so it
might be easy to switch to those versions.

I use libopencm3 and it works great, but will be some work to port as all the
APIs are different. Too bad no one looked at this in the initial port from
Arduino.

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sean-duffy
Not sure why this is posted here but Cleanflight is great, it's used
extensively on racing drones.

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jlgaddis
It was posted, I assume, because someone thought it was interesting.

It made it to the front page, I assume, because lots of someones thought it
was interesting.

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sean-duffy
I guess so! It just seems strange to me because it's quite familiar and
there's not been any particular release or news that would attract attention
suddenly.

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CraigJPerry
Yeah it wasnt a project milestone that prompted me to share the link, it was
that I'd just had my first pull request accepted.

I figured it's niche but probably amusing for the crowds here.

Initially I submitted and it got zero votes, yesterday out of the blue I got a
ping from the admins inviting me to resubmit and as an experiment they would
give it a vote.

It sat with 2 points for a while so I ignored it again. Then I started getting
Twitter mentions from various HN bots. I came back and saw it had attracted a
bunch of points.

I don't know what the experiment is but the mods promoting a fairly wide of
centre article for HN did encourage more votes.

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swinghu
Greate work!

