This week I worked with the team to help the drone get up in the air in the lab. Unfortunately, we ran into a few setbacks during the process that we had to overcome. The first hurdle was that the Raspberry Pi 4 unexpectedly stopped working and gave us the “green light of death” where the green light consistently remained on rather than blinking as it was supposed to, and the Pi wouldn’t boot. I researched the issue, and there were a number of possible causes such as the SD card reader being faulty or a fuse tripping (which would take a few days to reset). I contacted various professors and organization, and eventually we were able to secure a replacement one from the RoboClub.
In addition, I worked with Alvin to get build the proper firmware to upload to the PixHawk flight controller in order to interface with the sensors, and to connect all the sensors together to the flight controller. There were again a few setbacks here, as the internal flight controller’s flash memory was too small to handle the firmware, and we had to constantly adjust the build ourselves and try and get rid of certain firmware features that we didn’t need in order to get the build to the right size. After a long while of tweaking, we were successfully able to upload the firmware successfully to the Pixhawk and setup the proper sensors and airframe.
I also worked with the group to try and test out how we would power the Raspberry Pi by using the LiPo battery on the drone as a power supply and sending it through a buck converter to regulate the voltage sent to the Pi. In addition, I helped with the testing of the camera to get a script that can automatically record video to an external flash drive, and successfully debugged an issue we had where when running the script from boot, the script would run before the OS had detected the external flash drive, leading to an error where the file location would not exist.
Tomorrow, we aim to get our drone flying successfully, as all the infrastructure for integration is finally in place. We plan on working on getting everything prepared for our demo, and going for our first test flights.