uavworks / matrixpilot

An OpenSource Autopilot

MatrixPilot

Firmware for Bill Premerlani's IMU based UAV Dev Board and its successors

Welcome to the MatrixPilot codebase. Four board types are supported:-

• the UDB4 (Production retired at SparkFun)
• the UDB5 (Production retired at SparkFun)
• the UDB5 project in software also supports the UDB5mini currently available from Octopilot Electronics
• the AUAV3 from Arsov RC Technology. (Production retired).

Projects for the boards are provided for the MPLAB-X Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and XC16 compiler. From October 2016, the master branch no longer supports the legacy MPLAB IDE.

There are 4 projects in the repository. They are listed here in order of increasing complexity:-

• ./Tools/FlashOSD updates the character set of the native On Screen Display (OSD; additional OSD board required).
• ./Tools/LedTest is used to test hardware including the accelerometers, gyros, Leds, and PWM outputs.It is factory installed for 3 boards allowing users to test their boards on delivery.
• ./RollPitchYaw creates an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). It enables higher level testing of the IMU algorithms, firmware and hardware all combined together.
• ./MatrixPilot integrates the IMU with a full Autopilot for a plane, providing Fly By Wire control, Autonomous flight, Return to Landing (RTL), and Manual overide.

There are two types of simulation avaiable:-

• Software in the Loop (SIL) is provided in ./Tools/MatrixPilot-SIL. The autopilot is simulated as a software process in a host computer (Unix, MacOS, Windows) and that is then, in turn, connected to fly an aircraft in the X-Plane 10 flight simulator.
• Hardware in the Loop (HIL) connects a physical board running MatrixPilot to a simulated aircraft in X-Plane 10. It is enabled for any board by setting a parameter in ./Config/options.h when compiling MatrixPilot.

./Tools/HilSim provides the software plugin for X-Plane10 to link to the SIL or HIL versions of MatrixPilot.

./Tools/flight_analyzer provides a python program that allows analysis and display of flights with the help of GoogleEarth, after post-processing with our tool 'flan'.

For developers, there is also a makefile based build system (build-all.bat) and a project generator (Tools/Build/proj_gen.bat), which both Windows and *nix compatible.

For more info about how to configure and use this autopilot firmware, go to the Wiki at:

https://github.com/MatrixPilot/MatrixPilot/wiki

and see the mailing list at:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/uavdevboard