New user experience

New user here. I tried to install Arduplane on a Kakute F7 mini using a mac.

I found the firmware here ArduPilot firmware : /Plane/stable/KakuteF7Mini (Would be nice if there were a link to the fw from the page about the board)

The real trouble came installing it. I tried to flash the hex file

dfu-util failed:

dfu-util -a 0 -s 0x08000000 -D arduplane_with_bl.hex dfu-util 0.11 Copyright 2005-2009 Weston Schmidt, Harald Welte and OpenMoko Inc. Copyright 2010-2021 Tormod Volden and Stefan Schmidt This program is Free Software and has ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY Please report bugs to http://sourceforge.net/p/dfu-util/tickets/ dfu-util: Warning: Invalid DFU suffix signature dfu-util: A valid DFU suffix will be required in a future dfu-util release Opening DFU capable USB device... Device ID 0483:df11 Device DFU version 011a Claiming USB DFU Interface... Setting Alternate Interface #0 ... Determining device status... DFU state(2) = dfuIDLE, status(0) = No error condition is present DFU mode device DFU version 011a Device returned transfer size 2048 DfuSe interface name: "Internal Flash " Downloading element to address = 0x08000000, size = 2781308 dfu-util: Last page at 0x082a707b is not writeable

I tried with STM32CubeProgrammer. That appeared to flash but the board never booted.

I also tried extracting the firmware from the apj

jq -r .image arduplane.apj | base64 --decode | zlib-flate -uncompress > arduplane.bin and trying to flash that
dfu-util -a 0 -s 0x08010000:leave -D arduplane.bin

I then installed the bootloader KakuteF7Mini_bl.bin
dfu-util -a 0 -s 0x08000000:leave -D KakuteF7Mini_bl.bin

This gave access to /dev/cu.usbmodem12301

I then installed MAVProxy with pip (but could not make the fw filtering work.) MAVProxy tried to use uploader.py (which did not seem to be present)

I cloned the repo with uploader.py and tried: ./uploader.py --port /dev/cu.usbmodem12301 ~/Downloads/arduplane.apj (this also produced something that would not boot)

Finally QGroundControl popped up a dialog that allowed me to install firmware that booted.

Is there a better way?

what version of the f7 mini do you have?

Install the bootloader as you did and then use Mission Planner, or QGC as you did, to flash Ardupilot.
The STM32CubeProgrammer usually works also.

I think it’s the original Hholybro Kakute F7 Mini Manual | PDF | Login | Command Line Interface