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Lab 08 - Believer Comms & Firmware

Activity 1: Set up RFD900x

For this lab we learned about the RFD 900X, it's technical specifications, and how to use it for our application. We learned how to get it to communicate with the computer as well as how to get the two units to talk to each other ( ground module, air module)

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We were able to get the air and ground module to talk to each other as well as testing it by sending a hello world prompt from computer to computer through an application called putty. This was a relatively straightforward process as The procedure was outlined in our guide, but we did initially have trouble getting them to communicate as we had used the wrong BAUD and NetID wrong

Activity 2: Installing Firmware

For the second activity, we had to install firmware to the CUBE flight controller as the believers use a modified SKU of Mission Planner. They use their own ground control station as they are not open source.

Once we flashed the flight controller, we were able to test the ground control station connection. We were able to do this on our first try, and we were able to see attitude, altitude, heading, as well as a variety of other information on our ground control computer screen.

Having worked with autopilot and mission planner before this lab was interesting as it was somewhat similar to the way you would regularly flash a flight controller, however it was different in the sense that none of the traditional troubleshooting steps were available to us given that we were only using mission planner to install this proprietary software, and I'm not sure if this would translate to other aircraft outside of the believer if they also use custom firmware. I'm sure that a version of this process will be something I'll have to do relatively frequently if working for a smaller company or startup testing aircraft like this, or using some sort of surveying platform that is like the believer as a trainer, or other non-standard use. I believe even companies like FreeFly with their quadcopters use a semi-open source version of Mission Planner or ArduPilot.

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