Programming AUV without pixhawk

General Discussion
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We are building an AUV and we dont want to use pixhawk or smth related, we wanna program our flight controller with arduino and we will use raspberry pi for image processing.
But i couldn’t find any examples about that, everyone uses pixhawk, so i am wandering can we do that and how can we do that?
Thanks, best regards…

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Hello Hazar,
If you are building an AUV, I don’t think raspberry pi will be able to handle this much processing instead you can look up alternatives like jetson Nano board for it’s strong GPU. this is essential if you are planning to train and AI boat. you can test this by just running face recognition on raspberry pi and watching the CPU performance. regarding the autopilot would explain to me why do you mind using pixhawk, as i planned to make my own autopilot using Arduino but it wouldn’t be as reliable as pixhawk and ArduSub firmware. this problem was facing me as all the IMU sensors in my country had bad resolution and therefor bad feedback, also tuning the PID controller would take a decade to do, so i am guessing you should go with the pixhawk, it’s way more easier and way more reliable.

1 Like
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Thanks for replying Youssef,
I have jetson nano loaned from my friend and i just ordered raspberry pi 3b, i’ll test and decided to choose.
The main reason not to work with pixhawk is we want to build unique software but i dont know could i do in 2 months if we can’t we will buy a pixhawk ( pixhawk implementation is not so hard right? :slight_smile: ).
I can program arduino for manuel controls and i programmed balance stabilization algorithm with MPU6050.
By the way i know you from Linkedin and surprised to see in the comment :slight_smile: , i like to be in touch.

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Hello Hazar,
I am sorry for the late reply as I have not been logging here that much. However, if you would like to build your own software you can do so even if you are using pixhawk, pixhawk uses a communication protocol called MAVlink and so you can use pyMavlink which is a dedicated package for sending the needed messages for the pixhawk. I think its fairly easy to design your own GUI for that. but I still recommended using Qground which is what bluerobotics recommended. In the meantime I would be more than pleased to be in touch with you, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn or here whenever you want.