The most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project are setting up the Raspberry Pi 5 and getting the drone flying with the weight of the components that we have on it. Currently, we are putting a pretty significant load onto the drone, and we want to get at least 10 minutes of flight time on the drone. With peak power, we may be able to get about 10 minutes but we are running some tests soon to see how much that changes with a drone that does not move much while also carrying a full load.
We have made some changes to the design this week. We realized that the FPGA acceleration is not worth the time and the effort of setting up the Kria, in addition to the development time of getting the Kria on the drone to keep using it. I talked to Varun and he told me about an AI accelerated Raspberry Pi 5 that we are planning to switch to. This was mentioned in Gaurav’s Status Report but the KRIA can only manage about 1 TOPS (trillion operations per second) while the AI kit with Raspberry Pi 5 can do about 13 or 26 TOPS depending on the hat that we buy. As such, the increased performance and the reduced form factor makes the Raspberry Pi the ideal platform for our uses moving on. This will cost an additional $100 which we accounted for in our budget by not allocating more than we need. Since we are also getting the Raspberry Pi from the inventory, then the extra cost is extremely minimal for this addition.
We also made some changes to our battery requirements. As mentioned above, we were not sure how long the drone could fly for with a 2200 mAh battery that we are drawing 40 A from. We will run some tests soon to see how much that changes when the motor is not running at peak power but still carrying a full load. We have some batteries we can use to test, then we will order the batteries we need, which is how we will mitigate this cost. We are only buying the battery that we will need for our use case, and using recycled parts for our initial battery tests.
Although we have made some changes, we are still on schedule and no changes have been made to our timeline.
