I don’t have a Naza yet, but I have been doing research about this and I am writing based on the research. People who own this flight controller seem to be very pleased with its performance. It is very simple to get started and going, requires minimal amount of software programming, and it allows excellent stability.
It’s one of the richest in features flight controllers out there at the moment. It supports everything we can think of, return to home, altitude hold, carefree flight etc.
Especially the altitude hold and return to home functions are very accurate and it’s a great asset for aerial video and FPV. It is useful when the pilot becomes disorientated as to flight direction (which could save you from lost of planes). Many people that do aerial photography and video recommends this flight controller and from many videos we have seen, it does provide some very smooth shots as possible with the least operator input. It’s easy to fly around the yard at a constant height and not have the radical ups and downs.
However the Naza is very expensive compared to other flight controller. If you want it to be simple to setup, you want to learn to fly and have the money, the Naza is the best route and there is no contest.
If you like tinkering with software, look forward to flying waypoints, using telemetry and Mission Planner software than the APM is the better choice. The difference in price isn’t enough anymore to make the APM the clear choice.
The APM is better choice for the value, but the Naza just works without too much hustle. The out of the box stability of the Naza is excellent. With the new, much more competitively priced Naza M lite the choice becomes a bit more difficult.
3 comments
If it starts to fly away go to Atti mode and if still unresponsive go to manual mode. People don’t know how to fly the Naza correctly and get themselves into trouble. Almost impossible to get a fly away in manual.
Naza is simple and easy to program and modify settings, but did you hear about FLY AWAY’s by NAZA ?
In my opinion firmware for Naza still has some glitches and you have to be careful: don’t fly in residential areas or populated areas.
I had flyaway with APM controller some time ago but obvious was that I loaded new firmware and did not read release notes which specifically said to move my magnetometer as far as possible from inductive sources.
I learned reading it after crash :)
OMG! “Fly-away” sounds really scary! I haven’t had that experience yet lucky me!
Yes you are right, we should all be aware of new firmware, we should really wait for other people to do some more testing before we go ahead and upgrade shouldn’t we!