Firmware 1:1

What’s your plan for the next term?

• There’s a lot of missing drivers:

  • Ultrasonic

  • SD EEPROM

  • Vectornav

  • Motor Controllers

• Path Manager:

  • Can fly to a point autonomously based on old system, unverified, not optimized for drones.

• Controls is not done still (attitude manager) - Attitude manager will move to Safety

  • Return to hover is done but PID tuning is not done, simulator PID tuning is not possible right now as it would not be accurate.

    • Could do PID tuning from anywhere as long as the drone is tied down.

    • Just blocked by time, it’s still on the list to be done.

  • Logic is mostly ready, loose ends just need to be wrapped up.

  • Pitch controls are done but PID tuning is the blocker

  • Testing still needs to be done

• Telemetry Manager is not done

  • STM32-Ground is not done, protocol can be copied, but none of the logic is written.

  • STM32-Jetson, unsure if its done.

  • STM32-RC, should be carried over from last season, control schemes need to be decided and channels to be mapped to PID controllers.

• Interchip: Interchip communication needs to be re-written.

• Sensor fusion is complete

Don’t add new features, we have all we need for competition.

Validation Process

• Person who has the code has to validate either on a development board or someone else has to do the validation in-person.

  • System is currently played by ear, people would just go in when available.

  • Driver development and hardware is kept on-site.

  • Solution: Buying new development boards.

  • Remote individuals without access to Dev Boards is not as much of a problem and having people work on other people’s boards is not ideal.

Plans for testing

• Unit tests are ideally written, but not always, Anni estimates a 100% unit test rate

• Integration tests are not written at all, this is where a lot of issues are happening

• Simulation work is being done but it is a fairly low priority.

How do you plan to run your team

• Dhruv and Anni plans to use Asana to manage tasks to a far greater extent.

• FW work is slow, people don’t want to do boring tasks, so pair boring tasks with interesting tasks for one person.

• Load balance tasks more often, put tasks up on the Asana.

• For meetings, we want to have more communication, so adopt a stand up style meeting.

• Start having PR review assignment and ensure PR reviews happen timely.

• Mentorship: We want to have more mentorship, so we can try pairing people on tasks or we can have SMEs mentor work.

• Demos: Try using to demos to increase motivation.

• Increasing documentation.

Manpower

• More people doesn’t hurt, but the issue is we have less core people on-site. Only 2 core members. Recruiting wouldn’t help address that.

• 2 Core Members need to be doing PID tuning and controls, VectorNav driver development needs to happen on-site, comms code can be written off-site then we can just testing on-site.