X450 Quadcopter
New Brushless Gimbal Controller
When I bought the 2-axis gimbal around this time last year, the only controller on the readily available cheap gimbals was a SimpleBGC clone so that’s what I got. As I understand it, since the clones became popular the SimpleBGC developers have put restrictions on their genuine controller boards in an effort to stymie the clone market. This means that the clones are limited to a specific, quite old beta version - and that was just the start of my problems. I’ve never been able to get it working reliably and, after one final try last week, I decided to look into alternatives. It seems that the Storm32 boards are now becoming popular which is good news - they’re open source and the developer seems happy for clone manufacturers to produce them, so I ordered one and it arrived this morning.
The mounting hole pattern is identical to the SimpleBGC board so it was almost a drop-in replacement - I needed to remove the 2nd I2C port on the underside as it was contacting the gimbal frame and there wasn’t enough room above to just put in some spacers. It took no time to connect everything and then I moved on to setting up the software … which was trivial after I dusted off the Windows laptop and read the instructions. A few hours later, the gimbal was working nicely.
Posted on 10 September 2016
