You can purchase the OMNIBUS flight controller for $29.99 (limited time offer).

General

Airbot designed a 36mmx36mm (30.5mm mount holes) community version of his AIO boards. It’s called OMNIBUS and it’s outstanding. The great thing is that the board is based on what the community really wanted and it allows a very clean build by providing pin holes for almost every connection.  You can power it directly from your battery by using BAT/GND pins. The following list some of the components included in the prototype I was able to review.

  • STM32 F303 MCU (which should allow to run 2kHz mode)
  • MPU6000 (the 6 axis SPI Gyrometer + Accelerometer)
  • OSD (configured over Betaflight UI)
  • MicroSD card slot
  • 128Mb Flash
  • SBUS/PPM + DSMX Ports
  • current + voltage + rssi + buzzer as pins
  • 4x 3 pin holes for ESCs + 4x signal pin holes
  • IR pins for lap timing transponder
  • (barometer is optional)
OMNIBUS I
OMNIBUS II
OMNIBUS PINOUT II
OMNIBUS PINOUT I

The following pictures should help to connect everything you need to the board.

Pinout I Color
Pinout II Color

The function of the TRIG button is not yet defined (27th of July 2016).

Power

To power the board you have two options. Either connect battery directly to BAT/GND or supply 5V on one of the ESCs connections. However you obviously want to have voltage display in your OSD so just connect BAT/GND to your LiPo (up to 4S).

To power your VTX and camera you have even more options. Out of the box RAM is not connected to anything. That leaves you with following alternatives.

  • Short RAM and VBAT to get LiPo voltage. This would be unfiltered and could cause video noise.
  • Short RAM and 5V to get filtered 5V from the board. This would provide clean video but 5V is probably not enought for most VTX on the market.
  • Provide clean voltage from external BEC (which I personally will be doing). I will provide filtered 10V for HS1177 and my Foxeer VTX.

Firmware

USB Driver

This board will be officially supported in Betaflight 3.0.0. Currently it comes with a custom Betaflight version, provided by myairbot. Use the following releases.

betaflight_3.0.0_OMNIBUS-0708-1942

betaflight_3.0.0_OMNIBUS-0724-23.59

To flash the firmware you have to enter the so called DFU mode. On Windows 10 I had to use a tool called Zadig (download and start it) to be able to switch drivers for DFU mode to work. In order to switch drivers you have to take the following steps.

ZADIG I
ZADIG II
  • Push BOOT button on the flight controller.
  • Plug-in the USB cable (the red LED should not be as bright as normally).
  • Fire up Zadig and hit “Options” and then “List All Devices”.
  • From the list choose “STM32 BOOTLOADER”.
  • Under “Driver” choose “WinUSB” on the right and hit “Reinstall Driver”.
  • Close Zadig, disconnect the flight controller, close all Google Chrome instances.

Betaflight

Betaflight now has its own UI so don’t use the Cleanflight configurator anymore.

In order to flash Betaflight you have to press the BOOT button and connect the flight controller via USB. You should be able to see “DFU” instead of COM ports in the pull down menu now. The steps to flash a hex file are now straightforward.

BFL
  • Hit “Load Firmware”.
  • Choose the hex file.
  • Hit “Flash Firmware”.
  • Watch the Betaflight UI flashing your swifty flight controller.

OSD

BFL II

One of the most convenient features of this board is setting up OSD via Betaflight. Just forget about MW OSD or MW OSD GUI. Newest OSD releases will be included in the Betaflight firmware so you don’t have to worry about getting newest ScarabOSD from GitHub and compiling and uploading it with the Arduino development environment to the board.

4′ Alien Build

The boards is really well designed and I hope to be able to run my 4′ Alien with it. Please come back for some pictures of the build and videos of some acro flying… and perhaps racing.