Cleanflight

Cleanflight is an open-source flight controller firmware. It was forked from Baseflight by Dominic Clifton in March 2014.

Initially, Clifton moved the repository to Git, cleaned up the code, made it more understandable and easier to contribute to. He also posted videos with Cleanflight’s development progress, which made it more fun to follow. Eventually, Cleanflight superseded Baseflight.

In 2015, Nicholas Sherlock added blackbox feature to Cleanflight alongside visualisation tool, which greatly sped up the development of Cleanflight.

In the same year, Cleanflight was forked into Betaflight, which was more experimental (“beta”) version of Cleanflight. Over time, however, the amount of the flight logic changes surmounted and it became too troublesome to merge them all into Cleanflight. Moreover, Dominic decided against introducing some radical changes into Cleanflight, and Betaflight effectively became an independent project. It then surpassed its parent in popularity.

Development of Cleanflight halted in August 2020.