Introduction to Drone Firmware and Flight Stacks

In previous chapters, we took a look at major hardware and peripheral devices, as well as various sensors that are helpful for the control, command, guidance, and navigation of a drone. These are the mechanical as well as electronic parts that are interfaced and assembled to form the system hardware that we call a drone. But you will know that hardware is nothing without a soul, and the soul of the drone is the drone firmware. To control or command the drone as a whole, we require software called Ground Control Station (GCS) software, which we will study briefly in the next chapter.

In this chapter, we will go through the high-level architecture of the firmware, what it requires, what it includes, and the software that interfaces with it to form the drone. We will go through the following topics, which will be helpful for us to better understand what a firmware consists of and other helpful libraries that we will be making use of...