VOXL SDK 1.8.0: Same Hardware. New Aircraft.

Written by Tom Martinson

VOXL SDK 1.8.0 shipped on October 12, 2026, and it is the largest step the VOXL platform has taken since SDK 1.0. It is the current release for VOXL 2, VOXL 2 Mini, VRX and QCS6490-based products, and it follows SDK 1.6.8 directly; the 1.7 series never got a full release.

If you fly a Starling 2, a Stinger, or any aircraft built on a VOXL 2 or VOXL 2 Mini, this release changes how your vehicle flies, what your pilot sees, and what your engineers can build. Nothing on the aircraft has to change. That is the point of the platform: hardware ships once, and capability keeps shipping.

Here is what is in it, and why it matters.

Same hardware. New aircraft.

The flight stack is new from the ground up. SDK 1.8.0 moves VOXL PX4 from the 1.14 line to upstream PX4 release/1.18, for both voxl-px4 and voxl-fpv-px4. That is four major upstream releases of control, estimation and failsafe work landing on every VOXL 2 in the field at once. We stay on upstream PX4 deliberately: our customers get the full open-source flight stack, not a fork that drifts.

GPS-denied flight takes the biggest jump. voxl-open-vins-server 0.7.8 brings asynchronous multi-camera visual-inertial odometry (VIO), so cameras no longer need to be frame-synchronized to contribute to the position estimate. Initialization no longer depends on Ceres, which makes startup faster and lighter on the CPU. And calibration is now in-process and targetless: run --calibrate, fly, and the system solves its own camera-to-IMU alignment. A new VINS Calibration page in voxl-portal puts that in the browser, no terminal required.

For the people who fly our aircraft, the result is simple: the same vehicle holds position tighter, recovers faster, and gets airborne with less setup. For the people who integrate VOXL into their own airframes, it means a new camera layout is a configuration change, not a research project.

What the pilot sees

The video link between aircraft and goggles is where most of the user-facing work went. voxl-vtx 3.3 and voxl-osd 1.2 replace the old overlay path with Qt-based OSD rendering drawn directly over DRM/KMS. The result is a cleaner, faster on-screen display with far less load on the video pipeline.

The link itself is now adaptive: voxl-vtx adjusts to channel conditions in flight instead of holding a fixed profile until it breaks up. A built-in RF occupancy scanner shows the pilot which channels are crowded before takeoff, and AR waypoints place mission points in the pilot’s view. One note for fielded systems: voxl-vtx 3.3 requires voxl-osd 1.2.0 or newer on the aircraft, so run SDK 1.8.0 on both the drone and the VRX ground unit.

On the camera side, voxl-camera-server 2.2.43 adds an imx664-or-imx412 sensor type that detects which low-light hires sensor is fitted, so one software image covers both builds. It also adds support for the Nyctis 640 thermal core. And voxl-elrs 1.2 makes the control link faster to set up: quicker parameter enumeration, M0220 firmware updates over SMP, and presets matched by parameter name instead of index.

This is what we mean when we say flying in minutes, proficient in hours. Less time fighting the link is more time flying the mission.

Built to be built on

VOXL SDK is the foundation other teams build on, and 1.8.0 widens that foundation. libmodal-pipe 2.15 adds two new Modal Pipe Architecture interfaces, px4_vehicle_attitude_t and vtx_state_t, so your own services can subscribe to vehicle attitude and video-link state the same way they already subscribe to cameras, IMU and VIO.

Six packages are new in this release:

• voxl-wireguard for encrypted VPN tunnels to the aircraft
• voxl-quectel-cm for Quectel cellular modem connection management
• voxl-aprilgrid-camera-calibration for grid-based camera calibration
• voxl-bf-osd-font and libvoxl-qt supporting the new OSD stack
• voxl-portal-web-libs for building your own voxl-portal pages

voxl-configurator 1.1.54 adds hardware sub-revision SKUs (for example V6A), so the software can tell board revisions apart and configure them correctly without manual intervention. PX4 sensor and thermal calibration files move to /data/modalai/px4; if you have tooling that reads the old /data/px4/param path, update it.

Every piece of this is open. The full VOXL SDK source is at code.modalai.com, built on PX4, ArduPilot, MAVLink and the Dronecode ecosystem under a Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA). Start on ModalAI, then transition to your own design when you are ready. The code comes with you.

Hardware ships once. Capability ships continuously.

We call this software maneuverability. Software maneuverability is the ability to change what a drone can do, as fast as the threat changes, through software. It works by shipping software to onboard compute that already has the headroom to run it. A new flight stack, a new VIO pipeline and a new video link all arrived in one release, and none of them required a hardware change.

That is only possible because every VOXL 2 carries compute far beyond what the first flight needs. The same board that flew on SDK 1.0 now runs PX4 1.18 and multi-camera VIO, and the next SDK will ask more of it still. For operators, that means the aircraft they bought this year keeps getting better. For program managers, it means capability upgrades move at software speed rather than procurement speed.

ModalAI designs and assembles its autopilots, AI compute and communications hardware in the USA, and we sell those same boards to the broader industry, not only inside our own aircraft. SDK 1.8.0 is what that model looks like in practice: one release that lifts our own drones and every aircraft built on VOXL at the same time.

Get SDK 1.8.0

SDK 1.8.0 is a minor-version bump, so it requires a full system flash rather than an in-place package upgrade. Download it from downloads.modalai.com and follow the SDK upgrade guide. Flash the drone and the VRX ground unit together.

• Full release notes, package list and changelog
• Which SDK should I flash?
• VOXL SDK source
• ModalAI Forum for questions and feedback

If you build on VOXL, we want to hear what 1.8.0 unlocks for you.