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Introduction

This document describes CAN lighting board firmware. Check out the sub-pages and warg-internal documentation for more information.

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POC

• Anthony Luo Software architecture & board firmware

• Folarin Fatola LED Drivers & Board firmware

• Nick Armstrong CAN Drivers, Ardupilot Communication, & Board Firmware

Architecture

See Central LED control architecture and Single-Board LED Control for more detailed description. At a high level, there are 3 layers of control.

• System level control is dictated by ardupilot (+ the pilot).

• Board level control is handled by the primary controller.

• LED level control is provided by each boards MCU.

This allows us to break our system into a few categories:

• LED Driver

• Board Lighting Controller

• Central System Lighting Controller + Ardupilot Communications

Note that the boards will set different LED’s for each command domain depending on the drone state. Certain drone states will also enable certain command domains immediately (i.e.: landing lights).

Milestones

These are very brief. Who knows what we do with them.

M1 - Basic Functionality - F24 EOT

LED Control

•  LED Boards light up & are controllable colour.
•  Individual LED’s are controllable via Software.
•  Controllable LED brightness scaling

Board Control

•  Synchronization between all board-LED’s possible (i.e. fade all together)
•  Strobe functionality achieved (either main WHILE loop or timer interrupts)
•  Receive CAN communications & set colour appropriately.
•  Basic LED command domains

Central Control

•  CAN Communication with ardupilot possible
•  Communication (any packet) between LED boards possible (can be on unique bus)
•  Set colour and/or brightness over CAN (can be on unique bus)
•  Enable command domain over CAN (i.e. turn strobe on/off).
•  If possible - turn strobe ON when we receive ardupilot messages, otherwise turn it off.

M2 - “Advanced” Lighting Control - Ideally ready for COMP

LED Control

•  State reporting
•  HSL/HEX conversions available
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Board Control

•  Understand / retain position of board on drone
•  State reporting
•  Receive SYNC messages & re-synchronize to Central Controller
•  Receives “flight / ground / landing / emerg / off” flight states
•  State machine for flight / ground / landing / off, including standard LED configurations for each domain in each state.
•  Emerg search light functionality if NO can message’s received after timeout.

Central Control

•  Understand ardupilot messages & determine drone state.
•  Send out drone state messages.
•  Report derived flight state & command domain states to ardupilot

Integration level

•  When first powered on, LED’s go into “sleep” state (slow breathing)
•  When CAN from ardupilot received, “wake up” and start lighting control.
•  If ardupilot messages DROP OUT, but power maintained, go emerg.
•  Brake lights work (Rapid blinking RED when slowing down)
•  NAV lights work (relative to orientation of the drone)
•  Turn ORANGE when the drone is moving
•  Landing lights work (Turn on when the drone is close to the ground)
•  Beacon light turns on when LV is applied
•  Strobe light turns on when HV is applied
•  Stretch: strobe lights dim/different lights turn on when in different flight states (landing, ground, off)
•  i.e.: landing stage, strobe lights still send sideways, but dimmer / less
•  ground stage: strobe lights only blink on inside downards facing LED’s, at a low brightness, to prevent eye damage!

M3 - Stretch Goals for future

•  Central Control failover (when one central controller fails, another node is able to pick up the task, round robin until all nodes fail)
•  Wireless light sync between drones - strobe @ same time
•  Central controller needs wifi/bluetooth/elrs/gps chip - anything to provide PPS sync
•  Central Controller has light meter - auto-dims or auto-brights in certain conditions to prevent operator eye-damage
•  i.e. strobe lights dim in ground mode at night to prevent glare, but will compensate in brightness when outside during the day to ensure visibility., etc.

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OLD / archive

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