The Quadcopter Project Codebase

Structure

• archive/: Deprecated code and previous results that were deemed ineffective, invalid or improperly recorded.
• arduino/: Code for each Arduino.
• bf-conf/: Modified betaflight-configurator source to enable control and telemetry with Python.
• doc/: Papers related to the physics of the project.
• src/: Source code for all python programs.
• raw/: All the raw data, in the form of json dumps of the Data class.

Within src, we have bf.py which contains a class that communicates with betaflight-configurator. We also have live.py and rec.py for actually conducting experiments. They rely on utils.py to work, which contains Arduino, Writer, Plotter and Recorder classes.

Setup

First, clone the repo along with submodules: git clone --recurse-submodules --remote-submodules $URL. At this stage, the submodules could potentially have a detached HEAD (e.g. you forgot --remote-submodules, or submodule has not been bumped in main). To resolve this one needs to run git checkout main in the submodule directories before making any commits in them. If you have already cloned the repo, then try git submodule update --init, then again checkout main.

In order to use this project, one likely needs to prepare a python venv (for python dependencies): The packages sourced in this project can be found in requirements.txt.

Use nvm to get the correct version of npm for betaflight-configurator. The configurator will also likely need to be recompiled: Follow README instructions in bf-conf/.

Use

For usage of the code, the user is referred to the README files in the subdirectories.

Python code is divided into libraries (src/lib) and experimental / postprocessing parts (src). Most of the functions have been annotated with input/output and their usage, and a brief introduction to the libraries can be found in src/lib/README.md.

Development

Branching model

Generally speaking, the main/dev branching is obeyed. dev code only goes into main when it's tested to be largely working. New minor work is largely just being carried out on main.

Ideas for further work

There are a few tasks that we did not have time to perform along the way. Some notable examples are listed below.

• For a 9-axes load cell setup capable of resolving components, it is very difficult to make the wires exactly orthogonal. However, we can seek to find a matrix that accounts for the contribution of each load cell to the three components x, y and z. This can be obtained with measuring a few known forces, and using numpy.lstsq.