Advanced Development

Recommended Environment

General instructions on how to develop px4 firmware are shown in the official developer website: https://dev.px4.io/master/en/index.html

The recommended environment (well tested) is:

Ubuntu 18.04 ROS melodic with Gazebo 9

Firmware Support

Firmware Download

The px4 firmware for Kerloud autopilots is hosted at our official Github repository, and it will be maintained by our team and upgraded with official px4 firmware in a stable manner. Currently the lastest supported firmware version is V1.11.3, and users can clone the repository in terminal with:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/cloudkernel-tech/Firmware.git

# Then checkout with a corresponding branch, e.g.: master_kerloud_v1.10.0
git checkout master_kerloud_v1.11.3

Users in mainland China can clone our official repository hosted in Gitee alternatively to avoid the slow network problem:

git clone --recursive https://gitee.com/cloudkernel-tech/Firmware.git

# Then checkout with a corresponding branch, e.g.: master_kerloud_v1.10.0
git checkout master_kerloud_v1.11.3

If submodules fail to be downloaded, one candidate solution is to modify the host file following instructions in https://blog.csdn.net/qq_44621510/article/details/95251993. Then submodules can be updated with commands:

cd Firmware
git submodule init
git submodule update --recursive

Toolchain Setup

The toolchain setup can be done by following the official guide at: https://dev.px4.io/master/en/setup/dev_env_linux_ubuntu.html

Users are advised to run the two convenience scripts: ubuntu.sh, ubuntu_sim_ros_melodic.sh for easy completion.

Users in mainland China may face the troublesome network problem, hence we provide customized scripts in the directory Firmware/Tools/setup/custom, and users can run the scripts via commands:

cd Tools/setup/custom
bash ubuntu.sh
bash ubuntu_sim_ros_melodic.sh

Note: Make sure that these two convenience scripts have been executed successfully. If not, follow the corresponding error messages in terminal, and users can easily find solutions with the help of google or bing search engine.

Build and Upload

The firmware can be built for Kerloud Mini autopilot via the make command:

make px4_fmu-v3_default

and it can be uploaded via:

make px4_fmu-v3_default upload

Note: Make sure that the GCC compiler path has been set as an environment variable in ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile as the form below:

export PATH=~/gcc-arm-none-eabi-7-2017-q4-major/bin:$PATH

Note that the GCC compiler is under rapid upgrade, later versions than 2017 q4 can cause compatibility problems.