Setting up ArduPilot with FormationFlight

This document assumes you already have experience with Ardupilot, including manipulating parameters directly. If you're not familiar with this process, read through the ArduPilot Documentation.

Build

Presently, ArduPilot does not support FormationFlight natively. However, the FormationFlight development team has written a fork of ArduPilot.

In order to build ArduPilot with FormationFlight support, follow the ArduPilot document on "building the code", but clone MUSTARDTIGERFPV's ardupilot fork repo instead of the upstream. The rest of the build process is the same.

Configure

You will need to adjust a few parameters directly; this can be done in Mission Planner through the Full Parameter List.

Enable Radar support

Set the Ardupilot parameter RADAR_TYPE. This must be set to 1 for MSP Radar, which is the only form supported at the moment.

Set the serial port for MSP

Find the correct SERIALX_PROTOCOL instance for the serial port on which your Radar module is connected. You'll then set SERIALX_PROTOCOL to 32 for MSP. SERIALX_BAUD and other related settings should be kept at their default, which is 115200 baud.

Enable the Radar OSD

In the Onboard OSD section of Mission Planner, enable the RADAR element and set its X/Y positions. The current (2023-07) design takes up two lines of OSD space, the top for horizontal offset and the bottom for vertical. This may change in the future, but plan for 2 lines of space when placing it in your OSD.

The Radar OSD can be seen in the bottom-left of this screenshot (beginning with "C")