Pixhawk autopilot for custom UAV

Hi everyone,

I’m quite new in DIY UAV stuff, so I have a ton of question and hope you’ll help me to figure out something. I would like to create a drone (with Pixhawk autopilot) with airframe which is not included in QGroundControl. I find out that QGC also doesn’t define airframes, they use MAVlink library.

If I correctly understood, MAVlink uses firmwares from ArduPilot. In this case, I suppose that I have to create new firmware for my drone, where I will mention physical parameters and behavior.

Could you give me some tips where I can find examples or code for existing models? Do I’m going in the right direction at least?

Thanks in advance!