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Betaflight Supported

Betaflight Supported is the status for boards that the Betaflight team has reviewed against the Manufacturer Design Guidelines, and whose manufacturer has committed to support them. It is available for new and existing flight controllers. See the Hardware Policy for how it sits alongside Manufacturer supported and Legacy boards. To apply, contact the Betaflight team with your targets, and we will issue a supported key to add to your config file.

The key is issued by the Betaflight team once a target has been reviewed. It cannot be self-generated, and is added to the config as a REFERENCE: directive in the supported-target header block. See Supported Target Header for the exact format of that block, including the DATE:, VERSION: and GROUP: directives that control which firmware releases a target is offered for.

Benefits​

Betaflight Supported targets receive:

  1. Recognised Status: shown as "✅ Betaflight Supported" in the Betaflight App, with no warning.
  2. Firmware Regressions Fixed: the team treats a firmware regression on the board as its own bug to fix before release.
  3. Priority Cloud Build: access to the high-speed build server for faster firmware compilation.
  4. Immediate Availability: targets can be updated and backported. You do not have to wait for the next release to fix issues or add support.
  5. Public Recognition: brand identified and thanked within the ecosystem.

What the Manufacturer Commits To​

The manufacturer remains the first point of contact for pilots using the board. The Betaflight team does not provide end-user hardware support for any board, Betaflight Supported included. When a manufacturer finds that a problem reported by their customers is a firmware bug, they raise it with us and we work on it with them. For each Betaflight Supported board the manufacturer:

  1. supplies schematics for review, and samples when we ask for them;
  2. names a maintainer for the config;
  3. gives pilots a support contact;
  4. publishes board documentation on the wiki.

Requirements​

Targets presented to the config repository for Betaflight Supported status need to meet these conditions:

  1. Schematics are presented with the prospective config file. If your company requires the schematics to stay private, email them to [email protected].

  2. Our team assesses the schematics against the Manufacturer Design Guidelines. A design that copies an existing design rather than improving on it, or that shares SPI bus lines or leaves critical functions (gyro, motors) without the timers and DMA they need, is not eligible until it is revised. A new design using anything not accepted for new designs in the Hardware Policy is not accepted into the cloud build at all.

  3. There is a target fee for our team to go through the review and grant Betaflight Supported status in the cloud build system. Contact the team via [email protected] for details. Hobbyists can contact us on Discord or at the same address: we do not charge non-commercial users for target insertion.

  4. Companies that want to collaborate on the design with our team, for performance testing, optimisation and Betaflight Supported status, can do so through the Betaflight Partners Program. Details are available by emailing the team. Members of the programme are exempt from the target fee for new targets released during their partnership term.

Manufacturer Supported​

The cloud build also carries boards that the team has accepted without Betaflight Supported status. This covers community-submitted "homebrew" boards, manufacturers who prefer to support their boards directly, and boards accepted before this status existed. Every board in the cloud build has been reviewed and accepted by the team. New boards are accepted against the current Cloud Build Acceptance criteria, and boards accepted earlier keep their status.

What that means:

  1. Config Review: the team reviews the config and accepts it into the config repository, but does not review the design or schematics in depth.
  2. Shown in the App: pilots selecting these targets see "⚠️ Manufacturer supported", with a note to contact the manufacturer for support.
  3. Standard Cloud Build: allocated to a lower-priority build server queue, subject to availability.
  4. Next Release: new targets and changes are included with the next release. There is no backporting to earlier releases.
  5. Manufacturer Support: the manufacturer, or the named maintainer for community boards, supports pilots and keeps the config working.

The Betaflight team does not maintain these boards, and as Betaflight moves forward, a board whose maintainer has moved on can stop working. If a release is reported not to work on a board, we withdraw the board from that release and later ones, so that pilots are not caught out. It stays available in the releases known to work.

Distributing Your Own Firmware​

None of this limits what a manufacturer may distribute themselves. Betaflight is free software under the GPLv3, and a manufacturer can build firmware for any board, in the cloud build or not, and publish it on their own website for pilots to flash with "Load Firmware [Local]". That firmware is supported by the manufacturer alone. See Two Routes to Pilots in the Hardware Policy.