I ran the code and took some screenshots of the really nice web UI. Simple and inspiring since I've been working on a robot web UI recently. Here's some screenshots of the Makani interface:
https://imgur.com/gallery/NMjBJSY
Makani source code released
51–60 of 127 posts
Re: Makani source code released
#52All of their assets were liquidated in their Alameda location. I bought some power tools from the auction went to pick it up and saw this really long wing span in a hangar. I asked the people with the liquidators what it was and they told me it was used for power. Then I remembered reading about this company in Wired many years ago and felt it would be something cool. Well I own some power tools they used to use so that’s as close to having their history with me.
Re: Makani source code released
#53All of their assets were liquidated in their Alameda location. I bought some power tools from the auction went to pick it up and saw this really long wing span in a hangar. I asked the people with the liquidators what it was and they told me it was used for power. Then I remembered reading about this company in Wired many years ago and felt it would be something cool. Well I own some power tools they used to use so t…
How do you find out about these auctions, generally speaking?
Re: Makani source code released
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
The use of those processors and ethernet were not major cost drivers. There's a very nice technical document describing the network topology titled "A Low-Cost Fiber Optic Avionics Network for Energy Kites" in the collection of technical documents: https://storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/Maka...
At this scale, no of course not. But at 100 kW or 10 kW? Remember that the argument is about applicability to other kite energy systems. Margins get very thin when power electronics costs only 0.03 USD/watt for the entire system. It gets harder to hide signal processing costs as the size of the system decreases.
That's true - and it was always tempting to reach for another expensive sensor when we knew that ultimately we would have to simplify and rely on simpler/cheaper components.
Re: Makani source code released
#55Some of the code for the tools is fun to read https://github.com/google/makani/blob/c421e4497dd09c86b01725... This is not proper Java, at all. But it's what a lot of Java code looks like because it's a good choice for inexperienced devs or rushed projects.
According to GitHub this project is less than 3% Java. It's mostly C++, C, and Python
That's right; the real-time autopilot is written in C, and the flight simulator is written in C++. We have a really slick configuration system written in Python that compiles down to a Python dict and then a C struct at build time.
Example production C code (the crosswind flight controller): https://github.com/google/makani/tree/master/control/crosswi...
Example production C++ code (the "wing" model in the simulator): https://github.com/google/makani/blob/master/sim/models/rigi...
Re: Makani source code released
#56From https://x.company/projects/makani/ : > In 2020 Makani’s journey as a company came to an end [0]. To share the lessons and insights the Makani team gained from their 13 year journey developing an entirely new kind of wind energy technology, the team created The Energy Kite Collection, a portfolio of resources including a technical report, Makani’s entire avionics, flight controls and simulation code repositories…
X is what Google used to be.
Re: Makani source code released
#57All of their assets were liquidated in their Alameda location. I bought some power tools from the auction went to pick it up and saw this really long wing span in a hangar. I asked the people with the liquidators what it was and they told me it was used for power. Then I remembered reading about this company in Wired many years ago and felt it would be something cool. Well I own some power tools they used to use so t…
How do you find out about these auctions, generally speaking?
There's websites for disposition of company assets when they go under. The Makani auction was advertised on the Silicon Valley Disposition website [0] for a while.
Re: Makani source code released
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Opening it up makes it available to people who might look at it and get an idea. Sometimes the thing has to be available before someone figures out what to do with it.
Oh sure, I completely understand that. The point I was trying to make was that all of this flight control & simulation software is very specific to the characteristics of their particular kite. I'm not aware of anyone else in the industry making a kite that large and heavy - most of these companies are operating on a shoestring budget. Sure, it's possible that maybe some general ideas could be obtained from their aut…
We don't mention this at all in the technical report, but there was a lot of interest in applying reinforcement learning to the control problem, and there was some work done in this direction. (I was one of several who groaned whenever we were admonished to "just use machine learning." )
Ultimately we couldn't afford to dedicate much effort to the rather speculative RL approach (our team was small and we were always scrambling to meet our rather ambitious milestones - you know, the usual story :-) ). Instead we chose to continue to pursue tried-and-true controls techniques.
Re: Makani source code released
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does code released have to have commercial applicability to other organizations to be relevant? It seems like a post-mortem code dump.
We hope that others find the code useful. There are a lot of goodies in there. A full-fledged flight simulator that could be used to simulate a variety of physical systems. A Kalman-filter-based state estimator. Math libraries. Firmware to run high performance electric motors. We also understand that it's typically very hard to adapt and re-use other people's code, especially when it's no longer actively supported. A…
Totally agree! And for what it's worth, sorry it didn't work out.
My reply above was to the parent who seemed to think it wasn't all that useful. I looked through the code and found a lot of goodies in there. :)
If nothing else, looking at how you've approached problems can help inspire solutions related problems.
Re: Makani source code released
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did you feel about the project being shut down? Did you feel like you still had work to be done or was there a feeling that this just isn't going to work?
The usual disclaimer: these views are my own, and do not represent Makani, abc, etc. I was terribly disappointed the project was shutdown. The engineering problems were unique and challenging. And the team was absolutely world class. I felt like we could do it. And I wish we were still at it. But that's purely from the technical side. I wasn't involved in things like budget, and whether it would be economically viabl…
I never knew about this project. It would have been my dream job.