2024-06-01 EFS Director Sync

Owned by Daniel Puratich
Last updated: 2024-06-02
8 min read

Introduction

EFS leads and directors need to align on direction for the EFS team after 2024 comp debrief.

From @Hardy Yu they have tasks for onsiters it’s just the offsiters don’t have a lot.

From @Derek Tang “do we have any efs projects aside from can and zp? people want to join, but i don’t want to onboard them if there’s nothing for them to do”

Table of Contents

Attendance

  • @Daniel Puratich

  • @Derek Tang

  • @Hardy Yu

  • @Nathan Green

  • @Yuchen Lin

Content

Intro to 2024-2025 Program Outline

Current Projects

What Projects is the team working on right now?

  • CAN Stuff

    • CAN Integration 2025

    • Each CAN project is a small team of two or three people

      • @Stanley Tang is looking into this

    • Don’t know what we don’t know here so more fun stuff to come

    • continue as is

  • Tracking Antenna Improvements

    • EFS support on Tracking Antenna Integration 2025

    • @Roni Kant working on M2 Tracking Antenna Long Term Vision

      • Roni wants more low level, driver dev, free rtos, zephyr too

      • Arduino doesn't provide low level

    • Make pitch tracking working

    • Adding in wireless communication to groundside

    • Nathan’s board vs STM board vs something else?

      • Is ardupilot support something we wanna do?

        • Ardu has code for this that works, but it doesn't have a bunch of extra advanced features we could add

        • We should just use it

        • Can use minipix for this?

          • Go with minipix currently then EE could do customer later on once we figure out exactly what fancy stuff we want.

        • Why do this?

          • The ardupilot stuff is already working

          • ardupilot stuff might work better when we have multiple towers and need to collaborate together in one ecosystem

      • A lot of tracking antenna stuff we can do we can do with arduino?

        • theoretically ardunio should work, but it doesnt

        • we could continue with it

    • Is this a worthwhile project?

      • SUAS is open air, no obstacles

    • Keep Roni on arduino thing

      • baseline works for ardu

      • will be easier to implement new stuff on arduino than on ardupilot

      • switching over to ardu may be faster short term, but not rlly in long run.

      • Bring Roni to flight test so he can see the challenges we’re facing with the system?

        • not necessary as leads are designing the architecture

    • no big rush to get tracking antenna working

    • tracking antenna base doesnt have anything to do with actual data

      • mavproxy over wifi

      • at end of M2 tracking antenna will have wifi support

        • wifi coprocessor

      • everything will be seperate for now

        • custom board later

        • right now not using any custom boards

    • We walked through the goals in Tracking Antenna Long Term Vision and agreed on soln

    • We scoped out Tracking Antenna Controller Improvements (M3) for EE

  • ZeroPilot M2/M3

    • EFS support on ZeroPilot Integration 2025

    • we’re havin free rtos problem with system manager (weird thread behavior)

    • Want to try to get M2 code completed before midterms, but unlikely to happen

    • Milestones

    • M3 is waitting on IMU but is more or less

    • wanna test in pieces M2 then M3

    • we updated Archived Small Fixed Wing 2025 with our objectives

    • ZeroPilot finishing at M2/M3 then being sunsetted

    • Plane for ZP M2

      • Getting mechanical involved in a design is optimal and preferred, we just need to write requirements and tell them what hardware we wanna use.

      • EFS members should write requirements and draw system diagrams

      • EFS support on Archived Small Fixed Wing 2025

    • After midterms S24 target M2 flight

    • Mid F24 go for M3 flight is the best timeline guess

      • so we’ll do this a month or two after CONOPS for AEAC comes out essentially

New Projects Previously Discussed

In Scope Projects we kind of already discussed all of these above

New Project Ideas

New Project Ideas - focus on lessons from last comp cycle and in the debrief in choosing these ideas.

  • RTK GPS

    • preliminary testing currently

      • getting mixed results in terms of rtk fixes

      • need to figure out how good it is

    • developing comp system justified?

      • If it works do we want it? Do we want centimeter level precision

      • Is this feature neccessary?

    • we don’t have ardupilot rtk support?

    • We haven’t had much success with the current ones, better ones are ardupilot supported above 200 dollar range? There’s a reason why the one we have is 50 bucks

    • we tried it in an open field and got poor results

    • task was finding an RTK GPS for cheap that worked then integrate it into our system (ardu and tracking antenna).

    • unless there are any other ideas or evidence that it functions we should suneset this.

  • Gemini 433M/2.4G

  • Gimbal System

    • base for final stage of tracking antenna

      • doesnt rlly provide any advantage and isn’t needed so don’t actively pursue essentially

      • a gimbal for a camera and a gimbal for an antenna can be essentially the same thing

    • pivot-able camera justified? (auto cv, manual piloting)

    • depends on next competition requirements

    • gimbal could help CV for scanning around?

      • depends on competition objectives

      • for a lot of things we don’t rlly need a moving gimbal

      • every comp in the past they’ve given GPS coordinates for pads so likely they do again

    • wait for CONOPS before pursuing this?

      • mech has a lot of stuff on their plate, don’t wanna burden with this as well

    • Houston Gimbal?

      • use as chase drone for recording?

        • we can solve this with a DJI

      • port to comp drone if needed?

      • mech loading makes this not really viable

    • prototype before we decide to go for it?

  • CAN Magnetometer - https://uwarg-docs.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EL/pages/2551119891

    • there are good COTS ones

  • CAN LED Board - LED Board Rev 2

    • solid EFS project

    • low level development

    • designed specifically for our system

  • improve mav streaming (aka telem) over RC (aka elrs)

    • https://github.com/ExpressLRS/ExpressLRS/pull/2113

      • this one is higher baudrate than airport?

      • you can do mavlink over airport but its sketch/bad so the idea is this higher baudrate makes it usable

    • Why?

      • could use for other drones/planes

      • LTE hat / phone is expensive to fly on untested system

        • depending on the size of the drone the phone might be too big, elrs is small

      • could use as a backup

    • historically thsi kinda project hasn’t rlly stuck

      • whoever gets assigned to ELRS projects need to have used it so they understand the system, otherwise it will not go well

    • Is this a reasonable task?

      • Not for Roni bc leads don’t rlly have knowledhe

      • it is reasonable todo for us but want someone to understand system before going for it

  • improve ardupilot logging?

    • helps us just extremely indirectly

    • is AP_LOGGING too far out?

      • no end goal for this so not worth it

  • ROS Stuff

    • lots of teams were doing this at competition

    • what does doing this giving us?

      • unknown

      • helps for integration between subsystems of the drone

      • doing mavlink commands through ROS

  • Adding support for new type of frame to ardupilot

    • The weird folding wing things aren’t supported in ardupilot right now

    • we could add it into ardupilot and is really low level if mech commits

    • wait for mech to commit to what airframe they want. we should get mech to commit to VTOL type this term S24 then have EFS get started.

    • In the past to get the folding thing to work they added in a mixing system for the transition

Knowledge Transfers

  • Knowledge Issues

    • not a lot of senior members understand elrs and ardu so it’s hard for people to assign specific tasks

    • people will need a lot of mentorship to understand it

    • Solutions?

      • good documentation and workshops, get people participating in workshops

      • We will only be able to provide good mentorship if tasks are really simple?

      • we just gotta go for it? senior members can learn and go for it as long as we have a good direction

      • lot of senior members are busy with managing

        • right now ZP telem manager requires a lot of hardy and derek attention

        • only PM on EFS is for TM

    • what is role of directors?

  • Knowledge Transfer Topics

    • Flight school plan?

      • Getting EFS members comfortable with the whole system is important

    • EFS paper foam workshop?

      • I, @Daniel Puratich, think this should be handled somewhat by mech.

    • Get EFS members comfortable setting up ArduPilot from scratch

      • suggested by @Nathan Green

      • this is really useful for comp ← wanna get more people useful at competition

      • have people configure and fly stuff

      • do the second houston https://uwarg-docs.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ARCHS22/pages/2555969579 with EFS people

      • we need more people who know ardupilot

      • we can do a lot of software stuff but this is the stuff that matters

      •  

    • Get people comfortable reading and processing log files from flights

      • we should encourage EFS members to pull useful data from logs and help develop debriefs to help mech understand the flight better

        • we could have autonomy do scripting to proccess the logs?

        • automatically produce more readable forms of the data for use in reports and debriefs?

        • tools to automatically read through the log and find anomolies?

      • Logs are more important when we have massive problems

      • thsi is kinda fine as is

      • @Daniel Puratich

  • Workshops

  • Philosophy

    • We should have people understand the basics of the systems we are using (ardupilot, elrs, tracking ant, etc.) before people can start to improve and develop the more advanced features and functionality.

    • Need to pass on the knowledge for future generations of WARGians.

  • More flight test coordinators

    • @Hardy Yu to onboard two new flight test coordinators bc theyre interested in aviation and are interested in controlling planes and drones

    • may be brought up for next leads.

More Project Ideas

  • We didn’t get any new project ideas from this ….

    • embedded software side is one of hardest subteams to figure stuff out for here

  • We don’t have tasks for people who are offsite right now.

  • It is really difficult to come up with projects that are easy enough to be doable quickly but haven’t already been solved before.

    • possible solution paths

      • do things that are difficult but will be useful if we can pull them off

        • challenge is the we have low odds of success

          • this will always be a challenge

      • continue ZP milestones as something to do and recognize they will never be competition viable?

        • ZeroPilot has been in development for more than three years and not achieved fixed wing fly by wire A so like if we do things that are difficult the odds we pull them off are low

        • ZP has two problems: it’s rlly difficult and it’s already a solved problem.

    • Project ideas

      • Do FOC algorithm position control for BLDC instead of servos to actuate wings or rotors in a VTOL

      • Color OSD

        • develop firmware that supports custom OSD for analog video

        • would be very difficult but doesnt exist nicely COTS

          • there are attempts but none of them work well

        • this would be cool, neccessity is kinda weak

        • would be nicer looking

      • Controller Lua Scripts

        • could write our own scripts to do things we want

        • not rlly low level