Archived: Building for Pixhawk on Windows with Make



ArduPilot no longer supports make.

This article shows how to build ArduPilot for The Cube, Pixhawk, PixRacer on Windows with Make. These instructions assume you have already setup the build environment


The commands for building Pixhawk are (make px4-v2). Building for The Cube is the same except make px4-v3 is used. Building for Pixracer is the same except make px4-v4 is used. For the older (obsolete) PX4 use make px4-v1.

Build instructions

Open the PX4Console and navigate to the target vehicle directory:

  • Start the PX4Console. This can be found under Start | All Programs | PX4 Toolchain (Windows 7 machine) or you can directly run C:\px4\toolchain\msys\1.0\px4_console.bat

  • Navigate to the vehicle-specific ArduPilot directory in the PX4Console. For example, to build Copter, navigate to:

    cd /c/Users/<username>/Documents/GitHub/ardupilot/ArduCopter

Build the firmware by entering one of the following commands:

make px4-v2 Build the Pixhawk firmware for a quad
make px4-v3 Build The Cube firmware for a quad
make px4-v4 Build the PixRacer firmware for quad
make px4 Build both PX4 (obsolete) and PixHawk firmware for a quadcopter
make clean “clean” the ardupilot directory
make px4-clean “clean” the PX4Firmware and PX4NuttX directories so the next build will completely rebuild them
make px4-cleandep “clean” .d and .o files from the PX4Firmware and PX4NuttX directories. faster but less complete rebuild compared to “px4-clean”
make px4-v2-upload Build and upload the Pixhawk firmware for a quad (i.e. no need to upload using a ground station)

The firmware will be created in the ArduCopter directory with the .px4 file extension.

  • Upload the firmware using the Mission Planner Initial Setup | Install Firmware screen’s Load custom firmware link


ArduPilot imports addition projects (PX4Firmware, PX4NuttX, uavcan) as git submodules when you build the project. If you built the project before the change to submodules you may get errors. See Git Submodules for troubleshooting information.


You can ignore any mesages regarding PX4Firmware and PX4Nuttx hashes. Those are useful labels for developers but optional and sometimes the build system can’t find them on your system. As long as it says “Firmware is in..” followed by a .px4 file then you have a successful build which you can safely load onto your aircraft.

Hints for speeding up compile time

Anti virus protection is likely to slow the compile times especially for PX4 so it is recommended that the folders containing the ArduPilot source code is excluded from your virus protections real-time scan.

The first scan after a make px4-clean will be very slow as it rebuilds everything