What I think of the LUX F3 FC

This is a great FC, and many people who has got it all said it's performing well. However at the moment, Pass through doesn't work. (passthrough is a way of ESC calibration through FC)

But I heard, Passthrough will be working shortly. The new Dominic Clifton mini F3 board (http://intofpv.com/t-seriously-pro-racin...cingf3mini) will be utilizing the same VCP (virtual COM port) USB interface on his F3 board. I doubt he will let it go underutilized.

The VCP basically frees up UART1 from the USB interface by using the built in USB comm port on the F3 chip. 

The problem with passthrough it that the code is written to use the original uart1/usb interface. Once they update it passthrough will work just the same on all the new F3 boards that are designed properly. (e.g. using the F3 chip's built in USB comm port.)

There are also some other bugs,  something about plugging it to the USB and having to replug it and some other small things.


betaflight target: Lux_Race Target

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Spec

• Hardware inversion for SBUS and Smartport
  
• 3 available hardware serial ports (UART), doesn't affect USB interface connection
  
• High Speed SPI 8kHz Gyro (MPU6500)
  
• MPU interrupt connected to F3, allowing the F3 to know immediately when fresh data is available
  
• Dedicated Boot button for easy firmware flashing
  
• Reinforced solder pads for trouble-free direct soldering.
  
• Input voltage 6v to 24v. Power the board directly from flight pack up to 6S (on 'BAT' pad only!).
  
• VIN + VBAT merged - A single wire to power the board will provide voltage input and Telemetry/OSD voltage data.
  
• Filtered voltage output - output 5v 1A (and 3.3v where applicable) to power peripherals such as GPS, RX, BLACKBOX, OSD. 5v/3.3v RX selectable.
  

 

Just my Review of the Lumenier LUX Flight controller

Good things about the LUX

Overall great quality flight controller board, Very well thought out, very well laid out. It's very pleasant to install my electronics on it and not having to worry about too much where the cabling goes.

RX Pins and Solder bridges

very clever Radio receiver type jumper (between PPM and Serial - SBUS), you can just hook your RX up to the dedicated 3 pins on the board (RX signal, VCC and GND) then you are good to go. 

You can select which type of receiver you want to run on the solder bridge on the back of the board. you can also select what voltage you want to power your RX, e.g. 5V or 3.3V by shorting the solder bridge. 

Also this board powers the RX with USB meaning you can test your receiver without plugging in your LiPo battery, while your FC is connected to the computer via USB. It's a lot safer.

Other good things

• The 4 motor pins are at the four corners, so it cleans up your build substantially
  
• It has a bootloader button to simplify firmware flashing
  
• It's using SPI Gyro so you can run 4Khz mode (250 looptime) even 8Khz mode (125 looptime)
  

Negatives about the LUX FC


MPU6500 Gyro

This MPU has worse noise spec than the MPU6050 or MPU6000 gyros that are used on some other boards.

You can tell in Blackbox, the traces just look noisier with this type of gyro. It really affects the tuning and how high your PID can go.

To fix that, you might have to turn gyro_lpf on (set gyro_lpf=188hz), and also set dterm_cut_hz=40 to clean up the traces and get rid of the noise. 


Missing Softserial feature

it won't run softserial.
although it has 3 UART's (serial ports), but if you need more serial ports than that, you won't have it. Because they use the pin for the Gyro SPI.
For example you cannot run SBUS + Smartport telemetry + MinimOSD + External blackbox.... you will probably have to give up the OSD or Smart port telemetry as most people only use one of these.


No Flash memory chip
No flash memory, so you need external openlog SD card for blackbox