Blogs

My intention is to build an autopilot, where I'll be doing in-silico development using X-plane at first, then moving on to actual hardware (if the autopilot proves feasible). The plan is to do things a bit differently than what I've read here so far. Notably I'll be programming in Erlang for the autopilot, with the intention of running on something like a Beagleboard on a plane. All my visualisation, ground station, configuration etc. will be browser-based (i.e. Javascript).

The reasons for this approach, in a nutshell are

1. A desire to homogenise the development environment between GS and plane

2. Ability to develop in-silico as much as possible, e.g. not having to deploy each build to hardware and use complicate Hardware-In-Loop setups for testing

3. If you don't know Erlang, it's a great choice for building fault-tolerant soft real-time systems, with the emphasis on "fault-tolerant".

4. Basing control and configuration on a browser will enable you to control and configure from a laptop, ipad, smartphone, form across the world.

Hopefully there will be more to come. Some of these ideas may turn out be be bad decisions, we'll have to wait and see...