Here is the announcement from Betaflight Dev Team. Avoid buying new F3 FC from now on

Source: https://www.facebook.com/notes/betafligh...690708870/
THURSDAY, 28 FEBRUARY 2019

For a while now, development of Betaflight for flight controllers based on the STM32F3 chip has been hampered by a severe limitation that this chip has: Unlike the STM32F4 and STM32F7 models, the STM32F3 versions that are used on flight controllers have only a very limited amount of flash space available to fit the firmware into. This has meant that, starting from around version 3.3, the majority of the new features that were developed for Betaflight could not be added to STM32F3 based boards. Even worse, due to improvement in basic features, other more and more of the less commonly used features had to be removed from these flight controllers, and a number of them are at a point where they only support the bare minimum of functionality required to make them fly.

This means that, even if we kept supporting STM32F3 based boards in future releases, there would only be little advantage in this, as there simply is no space left on STM32F3 to add any of the new features that these releases will contain.

For this reason, and because the effort required to remove features from STM32F3 based flight controllers on a weekly basis is cutting into the time that we have to actually develop new features, we have decided to drop support for STM32F3 based flight controllers after the last release of 4.0.

This does not mean that it won't be possible to use these flight controllers after this point in time - they will still work fine when used with the last release of 4.0, just as there are thousands of users who are still enjoying their STM32F1 based flight controllers with Betaflight 3.2.5. We will also strive to keep these versions supported in new releases of configurator, so that users still using these flight controllers will be able to configure them with the same configurator that they use to configure their STM32F4 and STM32F7 based boards.

We knew it was coming, just didn't know when. A nice round number like 4.0 seems easy to remember, I think it was the right move at the right time.

Thanks Oscar !


Scott

I have been telling people for 6 months to buy F7. F4 boards were a pain with inversion. I am still surprised F4 are still around. Considering the small cost difference, F7 is the only one that makes sense.

Thanks for the update.

I agree with voodoo614, seems like buying F7 is the way to go!
About F3, I'm only sad because of my Mobula 7 FC. But as soon as I saw that CPU load so high I knew I wouldn't expect much of such boards.

Hopefully they won't abandon F4 boards in the near future.  Only have one F7 all the rest are F4.

(28-Feb-2019, 08:43 PM)Krohsis Wrote: Hopefully they won't abandon F4 boards in the near future.  Only have one F7 all the rest are F4.

I'm pretty sure they won't kill off support for the F4 boards. The achilles heel of the F3 boards is the measly amount of available flash memory into which firmware can be loaded. For the F3 microcontollers used on FC boards there is only 256Kb of flash memory available. For both the F4 and F7 microcontrollers used on FC boards there is 1Mb of flash memory, so 4 times the amount available than on the F3 boards.

With every new Betaflight release they were having to strip more and more stuff from the firmware builds that were targeted at the F3 boards to accommodate the 256Kb of flash memory space, so the F3 boards were losing out on more and more features as time went on which could be made available only on the F4 and F7 boards. iNav is going the same way and they already dropped support for a number of F3 boards in the newest 2.1.0 release.

I only have one F3 board which is on my UK65 whoop and I'm not too fussed about that having to remain on Betaflight 4.0 for the rest of it's life. My other boards are all F4's and as of now I will only get F7 boards for any new builds.

The crazybee f3 have a direct replacement F4.

You can always compile your own with only the features you need.
https://github.com/betaflight/betaflight...Version.md

Or you can download UAV Tech custom firmware.

https://github.com/spatzengr/betaflight/releases

My apologies for reviving a long dead thread. I'm trying to flash a Halo F3 FC (from a Minicube f3) [target on betaflight 3.1 would apparently be omnibus.bin? seems kinda vague.]

I'm trying to bring an aurora 90 back from the dead, currently, it won't keep my rx settings- I'll set a thing, save and reboot, and it goes away.

Do I need to roll my betaflight configurator way back to flash this thing? should I give up and retire it?

Nevermind, I managed to get it working by taking the dump all from my other halo f3 that had some jacks ripped off and applying it to this one.