PX4-Autopilot VS MissionPlanner

They are widely used in narrow circles :)

Two of (arguably the best) open source RC aircraft flight controllers (ArduPilot and PX4) are using extended Kalman filters in their state estimators (essentially sensor fusion that provides attitude/position estimate):

https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/tree/master/libraries...

https://github.com/PX4/PX4-Autopilot/blob/main/src/modules/e...

I'm not that familiar with cleanflight/betaflight/inav scene to know what the FPV racer flight controllers use.

Actually, even the General Aviation pilots who actually manually manage their own load-shedding during a mission would quite like automated power distribution and management systems... and if you felt like taking on that sort of work as a hobby project to cut your teeth, I bet the guys at the (open-source) PX4 project would bite your hand off...

As a flight pilot engineer you have to find a sweet spot and balance logging too much and too little. Writing logs to an SD card has huge costs that come with it, that's why you don't want to log too much. Logging too little and you can't debug issues later on properly.

PX4 also has lots of "topics" logged at around 1/10, e.g. hover thrust estimate every 100ms:

https://github.com/PX4/PX4-Autopilot/blob/main/src/modules/l...

Okay, but nowadays most people talk about “Pixhawk” as an open-standard hardware platform and PX4 as the software. The source code is at https://github.com/PX4/PX4-Autopilot and they call themselves “PX4 Autopilot Software”.

As an example, PX4 is a popular open source drone autopilot software: https://github.com/PX4/PX4-Autopilot

I am working as a Remote Embedded Software developer for quite a while now and there is no obstacle in Remote work. If I am missing anything, parts are arriving in under the week. That said, I never had a better work-life balance in the last 10 years. Anyone who said Embedded is not possible to do remotely just check any open source flight controller project (in my case PX4).

Run Mission Planner on a PC, connect it to your flight controller, go to "CONFIG", then "full parameter list", then type the first characters of the one you want in the search box on the right.

To add to this, most of the time one doesn't need to hack on the drone firmware itself. Just configuring/hacking the mission planner alone would go a long way: https://ardupilot.org/planner/

But if you're interested in more readable codebases without too much legacy headaches:

https://github.com/BossHobby/QUICKSILVER (for indoor drones mostly)

And for even less functionality but a good learning tool kind of codebase:

https://github.com/nickrehm/dRehmFlight

I want to build a gui to control a small autonomous boat. My initial plan was to modify this thing: https://github.com/ArduPilot/MissionPlanner

If you want to learn how to build it from scratch, you can still look at Arducopter for the firmware. It's entirely open source, including the GCS's like Mission Planner, and you can look at how they implement control over telemetry radios (using a protocol called Mavlink).

Related feature request, )elevation data from the Norwegian Mapping Authority ): https://github.com/ArduPilot/MissionPlanner/issues/2527