...
Start charging batts at 9am
only charge one set of batts for Pegasus 2
Leave Bay 10am
Debrief starts at 1
Done 2pm
Debrief
Intro
Attendees:
most everyone else left or wasn’t interested
Objective of debrief: diagnosing and resolving a few difficulties this flight test + the flight test preparation that resulted in not being able to fly today.
General
General topics - very loosely defined by Megan Spee , who was not actually at the flight test (and improved by Daniel Puratich who was)
Not enough preparation for this flight test
Houston configuration issues
houston was working last week but we wanted the rpi killswitch to work
params were changed to try to do this
changing these params broke the build and a motor would not spin
we were not able to resolve at flight line
parameters backups were either
not existent
not properly organized so we could find them
Peggy telemetry setup issues
didn’t know how to get ardupilot to connect to the controller for telemetry
spent 30 mins to get the controller to connect to drone at all
Unable to test auto code or ground test peggy as a result.
will need to redo this test, likely after midterms
systems integration / flight test operator / pilot knowledge base is lacking.
documentation does not exist. difficult to make this exist, because it’s related to:
ELRS (constantly changing)
Ardupilot (documentation already exists online for a lot of this, we don’t want to re-write for obsoletion)
things just change on the drones all the time and people don’t have time to keep up.
Houston and Peggy fly guides are out of date or unfinished.
controller inputs and curves are confusing and the documentation is out of date.
General sentiment of better-clarifying who is responsible for what at each flight test.
Changing around the flight test owners frequently so more people get exposure
Having experienced members walk newer pilots through these steps before being left to do these tasks by yourself.
you don’t know what you don’t know!
Directors should delegate the task management with PMs better to avoid overloading directors
Daniel had a busy week, missed comp arch sync
Couple thoughts on the fixed wing.
Evan (airframe lead) unable to attend fixed wing syncs .to express concerns
‘too late’ to fix a lot of design flaws
low confidence it will work well with the current manufacturing thoughts
Action Items
Action items following debrief:
Use the flight test attendee roles harder.
Ping people more leading up to the flight test.
Nothing is too overwhelming of a task for one person if you divide up the work enough.
All directors, pilots, flight test coords coordinators should take turns owning a flight test.
the admin overhead to make sure tasks are being done leading up to the FT and deciding what we need to do in prep for flight tests is a lot of effort, needs to be split around
Make sure knowledge transfer is happening.
Have more experienced members coach/work through the setup of peggy and houston before flight tests (ground tests), and at flight tests.
can also be aided by documentation.
Maybe some old operation guides for examples too.
letting people try things with supervision is important before they can do it on their own