BrainFPV abandons Dronin?

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BrainFPV abandons Dronin?

roteron

I just checked out BrainFPV's release of their new board, the Radix. I was delighted to see a barometer as standard equipment, but I noticed an absence of "Dronin" in the spiel, with only Betaflight being mentioned.

What's the intention here?

mlyle

roteron IMO: dRonin was a convenient vehicle for Martin/Brain to mature his product and use this community and not get a bad reputation for a lot of the early quality problems. A lot of long-standing bugs specific to the RE1 target went unfixed until other dR developers picked them up. Once he then supported BetaFlight and was selling more units there, there was no reason to support dR anymore. I think this was extremely disappointing.

As a result of all this, I designed Seppuku which is licensed royalty free (I have no financial upside from it) to DTF Air, so that our community would have continued support.

Radix looks kinda neat, though it has many of the same problems RE1 does ('446 means insufficient RAM for many things and it'll be hitting flash/code size limitations soon).

LitterBug

Copied from the BrainFPV FB feed

screenshot-from-2017-12-08-21-35-11.png

While some users really like dRonin, and there is nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, the dRonin user base is too small for us to officially support it. Unofficial support could be added, but it would have to be supported by the dRonin project.

raemin

On the plus side BrainFPV has greatly contributed to the graphical OSD...

This being said, the new product is a bit redundant: what's the point in selling a product that just serves exactly the same market as the BrainRE1: same size, same processor, etc... but no more dRonin support. A 20x20mm offer would have been much better for the product mix.

What about a 20x20mm seppuku

mlyle

raemin The original graphical OSD code and initial hardware implementation came from OpenPilot people.

roteron

Without being in the loop like you guys, I was always disappointed at the direction the BrainRE1 took, and after noting betaflight options the writing was on the wall as to where things were headed. Thankfully, you developed an alternative in Seppuku. I've been left extremely please with it so far, and admire the effort you and a few other very clever types continue to put in for nothing more than passion, it seems.

Each to their own, but I've little interest in the racing scene personally...I'd have much preferred Martin devote his time to navigation and more advanced autonomy features than shoehorning betaflight into his product. Hopefully Dronin can keep moving forward regardless.

raemin

mlyle True but let's give BrainFPV some credit: peabody credited them for resurrecting the code in Taulabs, and for quite a long period Brain was our only option for a quality all in one solution.

On a purely business perspective the strategy is a bit odd: allegedly BrainRE1 had lots of potential and in the end the only add-on was a bulky baro while Martin could have made additional sales out of its existing customer base by offering quality accessories such as GPS, mag, SDcard, telemetry, etc... Instead of this BrainFPV move is toward racing were there is a plethora of Chinese all-in-one solutions at unbeatable prices! Who needs graphical OSD and a custom logo in a race event???

Let's hope he makes some profit out of it, but my money will go to DTFc now

jimpriest

Bummed here as well - I loved the idea of the Brain with it's expansion port and the possibilities that opened up to make both a racing and non-racing vehicle simply by easily swapping out some parts.

Will have to check out DTFc and Seppuku!

halmummy

Bump

Strangely enough, betaflight is failing brainfpv's radix now for several weeks.

raemin_bis

The Brain controller is a breakthrough compared to other flight controller as it is relying on the F4 chip so as to drive the OSD. By contrast most other boards are using a dedicated chip that is good enough for text based OSD. In order to render the graphical display, it looks like Martin just merged the dRonin/Taulab OSD into Betaflight, which is quite a bit of work.

At the end of the day the brainFPV OSD for Betaflight is quite unique, and no doubt it takes quite some time to keep the code up to date. As an added level of complexity, the F4 chip has to cope with both the Betaflight code and the OSD, so things can easily happen if the new Betaflight code suddenly becomes power hungry.

Let's be fair to BrainFPV: 1) this is a different product with a very specific architecture 2) it's got some unique features 3) Inav support is also offered 4) it's hard to make money in this niche market ...