Anybody who’s ever bought a flight controller before knows that there is quite a bit of choice overload. The prices range from ten to several hundred Euros, and what that gets you goes from an Arduino with an MPU6050 to STM32F4 boards with all bells and whistles.
The one that impressed me the most was the BrainFPV, with integrated OSD (on screen display) for FPV (first person view) flying. But those weren’t available anywhere, so I had to make my own.
The I2C pull-ups are missing in this design. An earlier version of the board had them, but I somehow managed to delete them from the schematics without even noticing.
As I’ve never seen one of the original BrainFPV boards up close, a lot of guesswork was involved in reverse engineering the circuit. I’ve left out a few parts, which slightly degrades the video quality in my first prototype. This and the fact, that my board is merely a re-design of another board, led me to call my creation the Monkeybrain.
I don’t have a way to put silkscreen on my homemade boards, so I abuse the soldermask layer for that.
It’s no accident that the board looks like an RCExplorer Tricopter frame, because it’s meant as a drop in replacement for the Tricopter I built earlier.