ArduPilot Raspberry Pi and Arduino

I have a question which will probable have been asked many times. However, I’m new to all this and struggling a lot.

I’m trying to build an autonomous drone. However, given the price of a navio2 and a pixhawk, I want to go with a raspberry pi and arduino instead. Plus, I want to use AI on it so I want to use the raspberry pi (5). However, I have been running ardupilot on my raspberry pi, on which I connected my gyro MPU6050. Unfortunately I can’t seem to get it to work. I’m using QGroundControl but I can’t figure out how to start ardupilot (i.e., commands to start it) and connect the mpu6050 with ardupilot.

My arduino will be connected to the ESC’s and to my raspberry pi. Attached to the arduino is also a featherwing but I haven’t been able to connect this either. However, that’s a different topic for discussion.

I would be very grateful if anyone can give me some tips and tricks to make it work. Plus some articles on how to set this up.

Your approach is flawed. Instead of cobbling together a breadboarded autopilot “hat” that will inevitably work poorly, skip everything except for the Raspberry Pi. Choose literally any autopilot from this list, configure your craft to fly without the Pi first, and then work the Pi into the mix using Mavlink comms over UART.

I like the Matek and Holybro Kakute series boards for their features and price points. I recommend an H7 based board if you can afford it, but even an F4 board will be superior to whatever you were trying to do on the Pi.

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