I would like to ask for advice from the community:
Is this hardware design trustworthy and accurate enough to be used as a reference?
Can I really manufacture a board exactly based on these files and expect it to work properly as a Pixhawk flight controller?
Has anyone here ever tried building a Pixhawk from open-source design files like these? If yes, what challenges should I be aware of (component sourcing, PCB layer stack, firmware compatibility, calibration, etc.)?
Or would you recommend using an official design (e.g., from PX4 / ArduPilot GitHub) instead of this repo?
I’m currently studying and experimenting with flight controller / Pixhawk hardware design, so I want to make sure I don’t rely on something inaccurate or incomplete. Any feedback, experiences, or warnings would be greatly appreciated!
Are you specifically working with marine robotics flight controller design, or just flight controllers in general? If the latter, you may have more fruitful discussions in the general ArduPilot forum rather than here.
That folder is in a fork of the official Pixhawk Hardware repository, and doesn’t appear to have been modified from the upstream source, so it likely is an official hardware design.
Building a flight controller from those files should work, as long as you’re able to
source the specified components
which may no longer be manufactured, given the design is from a while ago
get the board manufactured
which may require exporting to a directly manufacturable format, and/or converting to a more modern PCB design software than whichever Altium Designer version it was made with - the needs here will depend on your PCB manufacturer
and have the tools to flash on an appropriate firmware
I’m not sure anyone in this forum will have experience manufacturing Pixhawk boards (so there may not be any more insight people here can provide), but hopefully that’s at least some useful information in your journey. Good luck!
Thank you very much for your detailed and helpful explanation.
Currently, I am a university student in Vietnam and have the opportunity to join my school’s laboratory. Our lab already has some Blue Robotics products, so I’ve had the chance to experience and use them.
I am now interested in trying to make a similar flight controller, based on Blue Robotics resources, control algorithms, and firmware. If this is indeed an official hardware design and can potentially work, I plan to build one and look for alternative components in case the original parts are no longer available.
Once again, thank you so much for your support and guidance.
If you’d prefer a flight controller with a more recent design/parts, perhaps it’s easier to make a variant of our Navigator?
It has an open schematic, with photos and 3D models for where our design has the components, and it’s less complex than a Pixhawk because the computation / firmware running is handled by the Raspberry Pi it’s mounted on (so there’s no microcontroller to manage).
The PCB layout/traces aren’t open, so you’d need to make your own, but you may also wish to move and/or remove some components depending on your application.
As a student, I think I’m not really capable of building that board yet, and I’ve also been considering the Navigator. It can still be used for ROVs or any kind of Drone/UAV, right?
Also, if I use the Navigator, is there already open-source firmware available for it?
Indeed - if you’re running BlueOS on a Raspberry Pi 4[1], you can upload and run ArduPilot firmware through the autopilot manager. There’s also experimental PX4 support.
Outside of autopilot firmware, it is also possible to directly interface with the Navigator’s peripherals, using the provided open source libraries (linked in the Technical Details on the Navigator product page)
BlueOS on a Raspberry Pi 5 can also run a Navigator, but our current board layout has some physical conflicts with components that moved relative to the Raspberry Pi 4. ↩︎
https://github.com/Nguyen-said/Hardware/tree/master/FMUv3_REV_D