Betaflight, INAV, or Ardupilot?

[Bad Raven]

A mild warning!

As of January 2025, the long established default firmware operating system for flight controllers is changing.

Whereas a couple of years back it was exceedingly rare to receive ANY Flight Controller other than a Pixhawk and the like specifically designed for autonomous drone control to arrive loaded with anything other than Betaflight, this is no longer the case.

What is more, the sellers of Flight Controllers are not identifying what they are loading.

Note, this is true even for FC's that are not being sold with specfic autonomous flight credentials.

Thus you find out on arrival when you plug it into Betaflight and it refuses to play nice! 

This is I suspect partly as the newer STM equipped boards can be simply forced by pressing a button into DFU mode to load any other type, so there's no longer the once much more grave risk of loading unsuitable firmware and bricking the bootloader on the board. A certain "military operation" may well also be an influence.

Just received a quite ordinary FC board from a mainstream manufacturer, to find its been supplied by default on INAV. That is NOT identified either by the retailer nor on the manufacturers documentation website data, it just states its capable of running Betaflight, INAV, or Ardupilot.  Even the order of stating the three is not consistent throughout, giving no clue on what to expect as a default load.

While I don't KNOW this will happen, its now only a tiny step from PNP/RTF quad sellers, where you'd previously expect nothing other than Betaflight to be loaded by default, to also just go with the flow and issue on any type they want, likely unannounced.  If this follows, the chances of picking up a new board or a quad and just quick checking or even using it unmodded are reducing.

Not a game stopper, but less convenient if you are one of the many who regard Betaflight as the standard.