We recently published a new article about writing your own flight controller software.

Why would You?

It is a reasonable question. There are a number of Open Source and proprietary quadcopter flight controllers with firmware available. The problem is we want to use an Arduino board, to fit in with our other training programs. As soon as this becomes a constraint your options are very limited. In fact, your only real option is to write your own. So here we are.

Initially we attempted to port BetaFlight across to the Arduino Portenta H7, as this is designed for STM32 hardware and we know that writing your own flight controller firmware is tough and time consuming. We managed to get BetaFlight to compile for the H7 but because Arduino’s use a custom bootloader which is located right where BetaFlight normally sits in memory, flashing the firmware was problematic.

You can read all about our drone design adventures.

A New Article by Reefwing Software on Medium – check it out: https://medium.com/@reefwing/creating-custom-sf-symbols-e295a2177aaf by @reefwing on @Medium

This app allows you to visually program a flight plan for the Tello Drone and then upload it to the drone for execution. You can also fly the drone manually with the app if you wish. Real time telemetry from the drone is displayed on the glass cockpit.

Tello is a mini drone equipped with a HD camera that is manufactured by Ryze Robotics and includes a flight controller with DJI smarts.

We access the Tello API by connecting to the airframe via a WiFi UDP port. Once a connection is in place, the drone is controlled using simple text commands.

It is available on the Apple App store. Download FlightPlan.