A video of the first flight of the Holybro Kopis1 racing drone loaded with ArduPilot. This is a low cost ready-to-fly racing drone that normally comes loaded with BetaFlight/CleanFlight but now, thanks to our ChibiOS port ArduPilot can be uploaded onto the Kakute F4 flight controller that’s on the drone.
There’s a new wiki page for this board in our “AutoPilot Hardware Options” section of the wiki. At the time this blog was written that page does not include how to upload the firmware but in short, it involves:
flashing an ArduPilot compatible bootloader onto the board
using MP (or other ground station) to upload ArduPilot
In the near future we plan to create an ArduPilot firmware for this board that includes the bootloader so that users will upload this firmware once after pushing the “dfu” button on the board but from then on can use the regular ArduPilot compatible ground stations.
These boards are included in Copter-3.6 I think. Beta testing is almost complete but feel free to give it a try using the Ground Station’s “Beta Firmware” option. If you run into troubles, the Copter-3.6 beta testing forum is here and I’m answering questions there quite actively.
… and to more accurately answer your question, yes we do have a version of the firmware with a bootloader included (look for file ending with “_with_bl.hex” here). So my understanding is that once this firmware is loaded once it should be possible to load using the MP from then on. I don’t actually have one of these boards to confirm that but this is my understanding and if it doesn’t work I’ll follow up with Michael Oborne who develops the Mission Planner GCS.
Thanks for quick reply. I have tried the suggested hex and it was flashed successfully, but then when I connect it to USB it was not detected at all. I can still enter DFU so no damage is done and I can retest. I have opened the question in the beta testing forum not to pollute this blog post.