Autopilot Hardware Options

This section provides information about ArduPilot Autopilot Hardware options. The list below is sorted by manufacturer and product name.

Linux Based Autopilots

These autopilots using an underlying Linux OS. Linux boards usually have more CPU power and memory many of the other boards listed on this page, but do not support DShot, Bi-Directional DShot, BLHeli ESC passthrough, many of the ArduPilot GPIO based features, and easy upload from the ground stations. They do allow experimentation and development of advanced control and navigation algorithms (see also Companion Computers).

** these devices are sensor add-on boards for a Linux-based microcomputer. See board links for details.

Note

For more information on using ArduPilot on Linux based boards, see Building the code

Firmware Limitations

Some boards have features removed in order to fit the firmware into their memory capacity. See the section below:

Note

If a board has a missing feature that is required by the user, building a custom firmware using the ArduPilot Custom Firmware Build Server can be used to create firmware which drops features not needed and adding desired features back into the firmware in that freed space.

Discontinued boards

The following boards are no longer produced, however documentation is still available in the wiki or online, and recent builds are still expected to work. These boards are not recommended for new projects.

The following boards are no longer supported. The documentation is archived, but available if you’re still working on those platforms:

  • APM 2.x (APM 2.6 and later) are no longer supported for Copter, Plane or Rover. The last firmware builds that fit on this board are Copter 3.2.1, and Plane 3.4.0, and Rover 2.5.1.

  • NAVIO+

  • PX4FMU

  • Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight Kit

Schematics

Schematics for some of the “Open hardware” autopilots can be found here