DroneNet for Ardupilot with Matek F405-Wing

BotBlox Hardware
1

Hi,

I’m planning to use DroneNet for Ardupilot with a Matek F405-Wing V2 flight controller (STM32F4, ArduPlane 4.6.3).

I’ve read through the ArduPilot documentation for DroneNet, and I noticed it’s described as intended for H7-based autopilots without native ethernet support. Since the Matek F405-Wing is an F4-based board (also without native ethernet), I wanted to confirm:

  1. Is DroneNet officially confirmed to work with F4-based autopilots like the Matek F405-Wing, or is H7 a hard requirement?
  2. If it does work, is there anything different about the setup (UART port choice, PPP configuration, etc.) compared to the documented H7 examples?
  3. Given that “many features are currently unimplemented” per the product page, can I confirm that basic Serial-to-Ethernet conversion (for Mavlink telemetry over a companion link) is stable and production-ready on F4 boards specifically?

Context: I’m building a fixed-wing ISR UAV and want to use DroneNet to bridge Mavlink telemetry from the flight controller to a Teltonika TRB140 LTE modem over ethernet, replacing a Raspberry Pi + USB-ethernet setup due to current RPi Zero 2W stock shortages.

Thanks in advance for any guidance.

2

At present, we cannot confirm DroneNet as compatible with the Matek F405-Wing V2. The limitation is not imposed by the DroneNet hardware; it comes from the currently supported ArduPilot networking implementation. ArduPilot officially supports PPP-over-UART networking on H7-based autopilots, and F4-based boards such as the Matek F405-Wing are outside that supported configuration.

The standard ArduPlane 4.6.3 firmware for the Matek F405-Wing also has the PPP networking backend disabled. We have not validated an experimental custom F4 build and would therefore not recommend this combination for a production aircraft.

There is consequently no alternative F4-specific UART or PPP configuration that we can recommend. On a supported H7 autopilot, the normal setup is:

  • Use a full-duplex UART with RTS/CTS hardware flow control, normally SERIAL1 or SERIAL2.
  • Set SERIALx_PROTOCOL = 48 for PPP.
  • Set SERIALx_BAUD = 12500000 where the UART and hardware flow control support it.
  • Enable and configure the ArduPilot networking parameters as described in the DroneNet documentation.

It is also important to clarify that the current DroneNet ArduPilot firmware is not a transparent raw-MAVLink serial-to-Ethernet converter. The UART carries a PPP link, which gives the autopilot an IP network interface. MAVLink is then carried over UDP or TCP using ArduPilot’s network-port configuration.

Therefore, we cannot confirm raw serial-to-Ethernet MAVLink conversion as stable or production-ready on F4 boards specifically. The product-page statement about unimplemented features does not change this limitation: the currently supported ArduPilot use case is PPP-to-Ethernet with a supported H7 autopilot.

For your application, the recommended options would be either:

  1. Use an H7-based flight controller and retain DroneNet and the TRB140; or

  2. Retain the F405-Wing and use a dedicated bidirectional 3.3 V TTL UART-to-Ethernet/UDP converter or a lightweight companion computer.