Hexacopter Hardware Design Questions

[Taylor Presley]

General questions, please redirect me if I need to post elsewhere.

Can the VOXL or VOXL 2 flight deck be configured to operate six motors? The recommended VOXL ESC v2 appears to support 4 max. Are there additional I/O on the VOXL ESC v2?

If I were trying to control an additional servo on the VOXL 2, for either a quad- or hexacopter, will I need the VOXL 2 I/O expander board?

[modaltb]

VOXL comes in the VOXL-Flight configuration, which basically mates up an STM32 based flight controller (the Flight Core v1) with VOXL, then there's an internal UART connecting the two, and you can control the Flight Controller with 8-PWM outputs.

VOXL2 does support (currently in beta) the VOXL2 IO board which provides PWM outputs, and we've used it on a hex. See here for info on that use case. Again, this is in beta (not directly in the VOXL SDK at this point but in the dev channel).

Depending on your size constraints, VOXL2 also can be used like VOXL-Flight, where you can use an external flight controller (like Flight Core) externally, which has 8-ch PWM. See here for info on that use case.

(Why not native PWM? The VOXL/VOXL2 platforms are Snapdragon 820/865 based, which are primarily used in cell phones.... The PWM feature is not needed in cell phones, so these type of SoCs don't generally have native PWM...)