I decided to bite the bullet and go with the HobbyKing HKPilot32 instead of the Pixhawk for the reincarnation of my Skywalker FPV rig.  By most accounts the HKPilot32 works as advertised and why shouldnt it? it has the same design and uses the same chips as the open source Pixhawk.  Thank you open source and market forces!

Here’s the content of the packet (L to R: USB cord, Servo wire, Power Module, the HKPilo32, cables for the gps, buzzer, arming button, stickers and vibration pads, free memory card/usb adapter and extension board) and a 4MB sd card pre-installed in the device. The only major downside is it does not come with the 6-pin cable needed to connect the HKPilot to the  Quanum Lea-6H GPS.

What surprised me is the size of the HKPilot. it has the same dimensions as the APM 2.6 which is great.

I’ve heard about the poor quality of the soldering and board layout of the HKPilot.. personally, for the price, I couldnt care less  as long as it works reliably.  Anyway, out of curiosity I checked the board.

and front:

In my opinion, the board design and layout is not bad, a bit dirty to be honest but not bad. The soldering while not topnotch seems to look solid  enough at any rate.. of course I’m comparing this to the usual hardware I see (computing and networking appliance’s boards).  You can judge for yourself above.

So does it work?  so far yes, I was able to load the latest ArduPlane firmware and didn’t really have an issue connecting MissionPlanner (except I had to set the connection speed to 38400)

Looking forward to setting this up for flight!