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

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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).