A modern, cross-platform ground control station for INAV, ArduPilot & PX4 UAV systems.

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Development State:

Kite is currently in feature-freeze state for the 1.0 release. Only PRs for bugfixes will be accepted and merged (towards master branch) But new features or functional changes will not be merged until after the final 1.0 release is out.

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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).

📖 Documentation  ·  ⬇️ Download

Highlights

• 🧊 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.

The essentials

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.

What makes Kite special

• 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 .tlog and 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 .kbatt export/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 — low-latency RTSP video 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.

Supported setups

• 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 (primary), Linux (x86 / ARM). Android is on hold.

Download

Grab the latest installer for your platform from the Releases page, or build from source below.

Documentation

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

Support development

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! 💛

Building from source

Prerequisites

• Node.js LTS (v20 or v24)
• Rust (via rustup)
• just — the primary task runner
• Platform toolchain & system dependencies — see the Build Guide

Develop

npm install      # one-time
just dev         # start with hot reload  (alt: npm run tauri dev)

Build

just build           # current platform   (alt: npm run tauri build)
just build-windows   # Windows release
just build-linux     # Linux release (on Linux)

Tip: install just for the best developer experience (see the justfile in 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.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. CI runs automatically on push/PR (cargo check + svelte-check). Recommended IDE: VS Code with the Svelte, Tauri and rust-analyzer extensions.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later — Copyright © 2026 Marc Hoffmann (b14ckyy).