I ordered one AfroMini 32 from abusemark.com and here is my short review of the board. AfroMini 32 is a micro version of the Naze32 flight controller.
Details:
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STM32F103 – Same processor is used on the Naze32 and CC3D
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MPU6050 Accelerometer and gyroscope
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BMP180 Barometer
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Only supports PPM Receiver Input. You need an additional PPM encoder or PPM receiver.
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No MicroUSB port
The board comes without any pins or cables included. Just the board. The flight controller is really small (33mm x 16.5mm) and light (1.75 gram). Its half the size of my OpenPilot CC3D.
You need to solder the pins on your own. Here is a picture with the pins already soldered.
As you can see the board is so small, so there is no MicroUSB port for setup and configuration. To connect with a PC and the Baseflight Configurator you need an FTDI adapter. You can also use Arduino with integrated FTDI chip.
Place a jumper to bridge the RST and GND pins or hold the reset button of the Arduino until you finish the configuration.
Then connect the side-pins from the AfroMini 32 to the Arduino: GND – GND, 5v – 5V, TX – TX and RX to RX (not reversed TX-RX! ). Connect the Arduino board to your PC. Now you can install the newest firmware and setup the board just like the normal Naze32.
Hey there, I’m trying to do this now and having problems, shouldn’t I be able to connect in baseflight and edit settings using this method?
I’m able to do that using a bluetooth FTDI, but using the Arduino I get a timeout error.
The reason I’m doing this is that I’ve been unable to flash beta/cleanflight using the bluetooth connection, I’m hoping I can do it with an arduino (nano).
Hey Lacy, in theory it should be possible with the Bluetooth too, but probably you should change the baudrate at the one, that your Bluetooth module uses. Are you sure you havent reversed the TX-RX and connected them right? Did you place the jumper between RST and GND pin, so the arduino works only as a FTDI adapter? Or probably your Nano has another non-FTDI chip? Cheers, Sergey