Erle-brain, an open hardware Linux autopilot

Hi everyone,

Pushing forward the previously introduced Erle-robot and together with the work we did at BeaglePilot porting APM to Linux both in the hardware and software side (work we presented at LibreCon 2014 last month). I am happy today to announce that after several months of improvements, flight tests and pre-series with manufacturers we are launching a commercial Linux hardware autopilot based on this work: Erle-brain.

Erle-brain is sold at 269 € and puts together a BeagleBone Black (rev. C) and the PixHawk Fire Cape in a single package that weights about 75 grams and includes 25+ sensors. The hardware designs are open to anyone that wishes to improve them.

The autopilot has a 4 GB eMMC flash memory that comes pre-flashed and provides:

  • Linux 3.8 kernel compiled with the PREEMPT option (best results we measured)
  • Debian Wheezy file system
  • ROS Hydromedusa
  • mavros ROS package
  • APM running natively in Linux (and linked with ROS through mavros)
  • preconfigured daemons for launching everything automatically, WiFi dongles support

Erle-brain has been successfully tested in copters, planes and rovers. Thanks to the contribution of many there’re drivers for most of the sensor and we keep working hard to provide support for even more accessories. Here are some of the ones we’ve been playing with:

Expect more to come :).

Besides doing some hardware hacking we’ve also been putting time in documenting everything. The APM wiki is great and we love it but we wanted to do it our way so we’ve spent quite a bit of time creating GitBooks that should provide a walkthrough no matter which is your technical level:

We expect to come up with more material in the next months.

Support us pre-ordering Erle-brain. We’ll keep pushing forward to create amazing Linux autopilots.
Bests,

Víctor.