PX4 Seminar provides an overview of the PX4 Autopilot system, its main software modules, and the Pixhawk hardware. It then gives instructions for building and flashing the PX4 firmware onto a Pixhawk board. The key points are: - PX4 is an open-source autopilot project started in 2009 for autonomous aircraft. - Its main software includes flight control modules, middleware, and ESC firmware. Hardware includes the Pixhawk board with an M4 CPU, sensors, and interfaces. - To build the firmware, users clone the GitHub repository, initialize and update submodules, clean and build archives, then make. Flashing is done using make

1. PX4 Seminar
- Big Picture, Building and Flashing -
Jungtaek Kim
jtkim@postech.edu
2015.04.03

2. PX4 Autopilot
• Independent, open-source, open-hardware autopilot
system oriented toward autonomous aircraft
• BSD License
• Started in 2009
• Be being developed and used at Computer Vision
and Geometry Lab of ETH Zurich and supported by
the Autonomous Systems Lab and the Automatic
Control Laboratory

3. Main Software Modules
• PX4 Flight Stack
• Flight control modules (Controller, Attitude estimator, MAVLink and etc)
• PX4 Middleware
• Drivers, uORB
• PX4 ESC Firmware
• PX4 Bootloader
• Operating System
• NuttX OS

6. Pixhawk
• 168 MHz Cortex M4F CPU (256 KB RAM, 2 MB
Flash)
• Sensors: 3D ACC / Gyro / MAG / Baro
• Integrated backup, override and failsafe processor
with mixing
• microSD slot, 5 UARTs, CAN, I2C, SPI, ADC, etc

8. PX4
General
Structure

9. Entire System
with
Comm. Modules

10. Dependency Package
python-serial python-argparse openocd flex bison
libncurses5-dev autoconf texinfo build-essential
libftdi-dev libtool zlib1g-dev genromfs git-core wget
zip python-empy
gcc-arm-none-eabi

11. Building
1. git clone https://github.com/PX4/Firmware
2. git submodule init
3. git submodule update
4. sudo make distclean
5. sudo make archives
6. sudo make

12. Flashing
• /Images/px4fmu-v2_default.px4
• make upload px4fum-v2_default

13. Reference
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PX4_autopilot
• https://pixhawk.org/start
• https://pixhawk.org/firmware/source_code
• https://github.com/PX4
• https://pixhawk.org/dev/nuttx/
building_and_flashing_console
• https://pixhawk.org/dev/toolchain_installation_lin