M.A.V. (multirotor aerial vehicle)

Quadcopter Flight Controller

Introduction

One of the best ways to really learn firmware development is to develop your own flight controller. You'll get to learn things like:

• Firmware and hardware design considerations
• Driver development
• Control theory
• Automated testing and continuous integration

So this is my attempt at that.

Wiki

I suggest visiting the wiki that goes more in detail on the components of the quadctoper, as well as how they are tested.

Components

Hardware

MCU - STM32F407 with an ARM Cortex M4 chip

IMU - LSM6DSL 6-DOF gyroscope and accelerometer

RC receiver - Flysky FS-iA6B 2.4GHz 6channel with PPM

RC - Flysky FS-i6

Software

Multithreaded flight control firmware developed using ChibiOS RTOS.

Required tools

1. OpenOCD

2. GNU ARM cross-compiler and debugger(I'm using 7.2.1)

3. Autoreconf (for building CppUTest)

apt install automake autoconf libtool

Installing third-party libraries

Clone all submodules with git submodule update --init --recursive, then run make install

Build

VS Code (recommended, if only for convenience)

Instructions coming soon.

No-IDE building

Compile with make.

Next, have two terminal windows open, and in each one:

1. Run openocd -f stm32f4.cfg on one window
2. Run arm-none-eabi-gdb build/ch.elf. Here you'll get a prompt much like running regular GDB. Then run the following commands:
   • tar ext :3333
   • mon reset halt
   • load
   • run

Using ChibiStudio for Windows

ChibiOS provides a free Eclipse-based IDE for Windows computers that you can download here. Download and unzip the file into C:\. Right-click on Project Explorer, go to Import > C/C++ > Existing Code as Makefile Project, then point to the codebase location. Build the project, then flash.

For more information on setting up ChibiStudio, visit this link.

Instructions incomplete for now, I'll add to this later on. For now, at least you know how to compile the code and load it into the board.