LOS Comms

Rough Notes:

LOS Comms is the interface to provide bi directional communication with any airside modules. Currently, the two biggest airside modules to communicate with is CV’s Jetson(UART?) and ardupilot (PPM).

Refer here for all messages and formats: Communication & Message Formats

By the looks of it, communication will be constant in both directions.

Initial Thoughts:

• Method of communication is UART

• When ZP SW wants to send a message, should it immediately send the message through UART or will it be necessary to hold it in a buffer before being sent in case there are too many messages to be sent.

• In terms of incoming messages, should we implement a buffer system, where incoming messages are place in a buffer waiting to be processed?

  • What will trigger this processing of messages? A thread within LOS?

• ZP SW will then have to call a “get” function in order to retrieve any data in which the interface will just fetch the most recent data

  • The member variables should be these messages and “getting” them is just returning what is stored in that variable.

Main Question:

• Is this communication/message format flight frame agnostic? Competition agnostic?

• How can we make this interface general enough so that we don’t have to change it as soon as the comp/drone changes?