MAVLink Customisation

QGC communicates with flight stacks using MAVLink, a very lightweight messaging protocol that has been designed for the drone ecosystem. QGC includes the ArduPilotMega.xml dialect by default, which allows it to communicate with both PX4 and Ardupilot (PX4 uses common.xml, which is incuded in ArduPilotMega).

In order to add support for a new set of messages you will ultimately need to add them to ArduPilotMega.xml or common.xml, or fork QGroundControl and include your own dialect.

To do this:

• Replace the pre-build C library at /qgroundcontrol/libs/mavlink/include/mavlink.
  • By default this is a submodule importing https://github.com/mavlink/c_library_v2
  • You can change the submodule, or build your own libraries using the MAVLink toolchain.
• You can change the whole dialect used by setting it in MAVLINK_CONF when running qmake.