Hello, I’m fairly new to Ardupilot so I beg your pardon if this question seems absurd. I’m on the road to get knowing Ardupilot better and better.
I and my research team is currently investigating a novel multicopter design based on the trirotor frame. Apart from 4 outputs that control the rotors angular speed and the servo tail angle, we have one extra output to control the thrust motor. Because of the high-quality components of PixHawk, we are planning to modify the firmware of Ardupilot and reupload it to PixHawk to control the aircraft, but we are not sure how to test the firmware.
Can I use SITL to test the firmware in a virtual physical environment to check the firmware functions correctly, prior to uploading the firmware to our PixHawk? And if possible, can you recommend me an easy way to understand how source code is written in the Github Ardupilot code base. I’m currently trying to learn from the source code but it was too challenging. Moreover, the algorithm that I’ve prototyped is not of PID type so a lot of change has to be made.
Thank you for your reading, any help is greatly appreciated.