How to Write your own Flight Controller Software — Part 1

Why would You?

David Such
9 min readNov 8, 2020

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.

Design a Drone

4 stories

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.

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David Such
David Such

Written by David Such

Reefwing Software · Embedded Systems Engineer · iOS & AI Development · Robotics · Drones · Arduino · Raspberry Pi · Flight Control

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