A modern, cross-platform ground control station for INAV, ArduPilot & PX4 UAV systems.
Kite is currently in feature-freeze for the 1.0 release, so which branch you target matters:
- Bugfixes for 1.0 → pull request against
master, the release line. - New features or functional changes → pull request against
development, the integration trunk. They are welcome there now, but will not reachmasteruntil after the final 1.0 release.
Nobody commits to either branch directly — see Contributing for the full branching model.
Kite Ground Control (Kite GC) is a modern, cross-platform ground control station for INAV, ArduPilot and PX4 aircraft — planes, multirotors, VTOL, helicopters, rovers and boats. It combines everything you expect from a GCS with a fast, intuitive interface and a few things you won't find anywhere else — like a full 3D flight view, a fleet & battery manager, and live video right next to the map.
Built with Tauri 2.0 (Rust backend) and Svelte 5 (TypeScript frontend).
- 🧊 Immersive 3D flight view — a full 3D globe with real terrain, your aircraft and track in 3D, a 3D mission overlay, an FPV cockpit camera and real-time day/night lighting; switch 2D ⇄ 3D seamlessly.
- 🚁 One GCS for INAV, ArduPilot & PX4 — plan, fly and log across all three autopilots with a consistent interface, including passive (listen-only) and relay link modes.
- 🏭 Fleet, Battery & Mission managers — keep a library of your aircraft and batteries with full build sheets and lifetime stats, plus a reusable mission library — all linked to your flight log.
- ⚡ Fast & intuitive — a performance-oriented interface with dockable widgets and panels that remembers your layout, so the focus stays on flying.
Everything you'd expect from a ground station:
- Live telemetry & HUD — attitude, altitude, speed (incl. airspeed), a compass with wind and ground-track indicators, GPS/sensor health, link quality and flight-mode display.
- Customisable widget dashboard — drag-and-drop flight widgets docked to the side and bottom.
- 2D moving map — aircraft, track, home and mission, with heading-up mode and day/night shading.
- Mission planning — create, upload, download and edit missions; undo/redo; a survey-pattern generator; terrain-following / AGL waypoints.
- Vehicle control — arm/disarm, flight-mode changes, takeoff/RTL/loiter and more (ArduPilot/PX4).
- Comfort — a multi-language interface (English, German, French at launch) with persistent window, layout and settings between sessions.
- Full 3D mode — Cesium 3D globe with real terrain, a unified 3D mission overlay, an FPV cockpit camera with a conformal HUD, and live day/night lighting.
- Terrain awareness — AGL (above-ground) waypoints, a terrain-profile analysis for your mission, and live terrain radar / AGL widgets in flight.
- Flight Logbook — automatic recording with replay, plus import of INAV blackbox, ArduPilot
Dataflash, MAVLink
.tlogand MWPTools-compatible raw-MSP logs — unified into one searchable flight history. - Fleet (Vehicle) Manager — a build sheet per aircraft (airframe, propulsion, FC, sensors, photo)
with lifetime statistics, auto-linked to your flights; export/import as
.kvehicle. - Battery Manager — track each pack by serial: cycles, lifetime usage and health, with
.kbattexport/import. - Safety suite — geofences (ArduPilot/PX4), geozones (INAV), safe-home & fixed-wing autoland, airspace overlays (airports, controlled airspace, obstacles) and foreign-vehicle radar with ADS-B proximity & conflict alerts.
- Live video — a local capture device (webcam / USB capture card) or a low-latency RTSP stream, shown alongside (or behind) the map, with one-click map ⇄ video swapping.
- Telemetry relay — re-encode and forward live telemetry to other ground stations, handsets or an antenna tracker.
- RC control — fly from the GCS with a gamepad/joystick (HID).
- RF link analysis — visualise signal quality to find the best antenna setup.
- Autopilots: INAV (7.0+), ArduPilot, PX4.
- Aircraft: fixed-wing, flying-wing, VTOL, multirotor, helicopter, rover, boat.
- Connections: USB / serial, Bluetooth (SPP & BLE), TCP, UDP.
- Link modes: live control link, passive listen-only telemetry, or a relay that re-broadcasts to other ground stations.
- Platforms: Windows, macOS (universal, unsigned) and Linux (x86-64 / ARM64). Android and iOS are in development for a release after 1.0.
Grab the latest installer for your platform from the Releases page, or build from source below.
Full documentation is online at b14ckyy.github.io/Kite-GC:
- Getting started: Installation · First connection · Quick tour
- Guides: Missions · Telemetry & display · Logbook · Safety · 3D map · Video
- Trouble connecting? Troubleshooting → Connection
- For developers: Overview · Architecture · Building from source · Contributing
Kite GC is free, open-source software built in my spare time. If it's useful to you and you'd like to support its development, a donation is hugely appreciated — thank you! 💛
- Node.js LTS (v20 or v24)
- Rust (via rustup)
- just — the primary task runner
- Platform toolchain & system dependencies — see the Build Guide
npm install # one-time
just dev # start with hot reload (alt: npm run tauri dev)just build # current platform (alt: npm run tauri build)
just build-windows # Windows release
just build-macos # macOS release (on macOS)
just build-linux # Linux release (on Linux)Tip: install
justfor the best developer experience (see thejustfilein the project root). More detail — setup, troubleshooting and CI — is in the Building from source guide, and the Architecture overview explains how Kite fits together.
Issues and pull requests are welcome — see
Contributing for the branching
model and coding conventions. CI runs svelte-check, cargo check, clippy and the Rust tests on
Windows, macOS and Linux for every pull request. Recommended IDE:
VS Code with the
Svelte,
Tauri and
rust-analyzer extensions.
GPL-3.0-or-later — Copyright © 2026 Marc Hoffmann (b14ckyy).