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Makani source code released

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Re: Makani source code released

#121

Neat! If I'm reading the repository right, it looks like the avionics firmware ran on a TMS570 Cortex-R microcontroller made by TI: https://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Category:TMS570 I'm pleasantly surprised to see that instead of a big Cortex-A or x86/64 chip. It's cool to read well-funded code for a small realtime SoC. you don't see them too often outside of things like memory controllers and safety-critical…

The TMS570 has a decent amount of computing power on it for a microcontroller. The CPU core itself seems pretty solid. Unfortunately, the peripheral set is incredibly painful to develop for because it's riddled with poorly thought out registers and silicon bugs.

For low volume stuff, the chance of a detectable miscalculation occuring in the field is low, while the chance of a firmware bug causing a failure is high. Using a TMS570 for a hobby project would be a very poor choice. With a sufficiently high volume project, though, the development pain can be worth it.

The redundant cross checked CPU cores gives you piece of mind that the thing will self-diagnose a miscalculation and report it, rather than go off into the weeds. It enables you to responsibly design safety critical fault tolerant systems based on explicit handoff from one MCU to another. Without the cross checking, you can't trust a single MCU to act rationally; in designs like that, you typically need more than two MCUs with majority voting circuitry. So the TMS570 can help reduce total system complexity at the cost of lower level firmware pain.

Re: Makani source code released

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X is still X and Google is still Google. Outside of X, Google was never known for crazy moonshots. Google was always an ad platform with a search engine.

X was Google X, now it's Alphabet X. Google was Google, now it's Alphabet Google. Google was the name of the search engine and the company. Now the company name has changed, everything is restructured and Google is an ad platform with a search engine. "X Development LLC. is an American semi-secret research and development facility and organization founded by Google in January 2010, which now operates as a subsidiary…

That's the name of the legal entity. The actual name, if memory serves, is "X, the moonshot factory".

Re: Makani source code released

#123
post #119

Former Makanite, and current abc employee here. Happy to answer questions.

Where did everyone go? I wanna work with people who do stuff like this.

Some people stayed in Alphabet, either working at Google, X, or one of the bets. Other people left Alphabet and went to work somewhere else. Some are still searching for jobs (covid made the job search somewhat difficult)

Re: Makani source code released

#124

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

That’s awesome! What OS did you use to run it? Did you do native installation or use docker?

Re: Makani source code released

#125

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

That’s awesome! What OS did you use to run it? Did you do native installation or use docker?

Ubuntu 18.04 host but I ran it from docker.

Re: Makani source code released

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X was Google X, now it's Alphabet X. Google was Google, now it's Alphabet Google. Google was the name of the search engine and the company. Now the company name has changed, everything is restructured and Google is an ad platform with a search engine. "X Development LLC. is an American semi-secret research and development facility and organization founded by Google in January 2010, which now operates as a subsidiary…

"X is what Google used to be." didn't strike me as a comment about the paperwork of corporate restructuring, but rather a comment on how Google isn't doing interesting things anymore. And I don't think anything changed in that regard. They just pulled non-core businesses such as X into Alphabet Inc. That doesn't mean that what X is doing used to be more important to Google than it is to Alphabet now, it's just paperw…

> Google isn't doing interesting things anymore.

I think they've founded X because Google's interesting ideas got too big for a single department, so they spun it off.

We don't know how many smaller X inventions get into Google ecosystem. I'm sure that some of that research got integrated back into their data centers or networking hardware, etc.

Re: Makani source code released

#127

From 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…

IEEE Spectrum did a story on us a few days ago that you might want to check out too:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/exclu...

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