Hello to everybody!
I'm Mario, an aerospace engineering student who is currently working on his master thesis.
I have been assigned to a project related to the 3drobotics Iris+ drone, and the drone is here, close to me, since it's property of the University. In this phase of the project I'm basicly studying all the features and functionalities of the UAS and now, after examinating all the mechanical parts and all the sensors, I would like to approach to the firmware.
Connecting the drone to mission planner software, on the top of the window I see this writing:
Mission Planner 1.3.32 build 1.1.5736.30798 Arducopter V3.2 (c8e0f3e1)
So I suppose that "Arducopter V3.2" is the version of the firmware currently installed on the pixhawk board inside the drone. (By the way, does the code "c8e0f3e1" means something important?)
Now, my question is this: how should I do in order to examinate this version of the firmware to study and understand some parts of the computer code (and maybe in the future modify it)? Must I connect the Pixhawk board to the computer through the "Serial 4/5 port" or is it possible to just dowload it from internet?
Thank you in advance for your answers :)
Replies
On the ardupilot website for developers is written:
The ArduPilot project source code for Plane, Copter, Rover and Antenna Tracker are available on GitHub in the https://github.com/diydrones/ardupilot repository.
Following the link I've found this page: https://github.com/diydrones/ardupilot/tree/ArduCopter-3.2/ArduCopter
But on my Iris+ drone is mounted a "Pixhawk" autopilot hardware. And on the developers site is also written:
Several additional projects are used for PX4 based platforms (ie. PX4v1 and Pixhawk): PX4Firmware, PX4NuttX, uavcan — these are imported as Git Submodules when you build the project.
So now I'm a bit confused... Is my firmware made by the codes showed in the page that I've linked above (https://github.com/diydrones/ardupilot/tree/ArduCopter-3.2/ArduCopter) or should I search somewhere else?