makani

I'm currently at a small company and often find myself looking outside for solutions and techniques in the embedded software space. The areas I'm interested in are C, testing and testability, architecture and portability, real-time control, build systems and CI. Leaving books and Stack Overflow aside, the value of projects is in their demonstration: the maturity/immaturity, advantages/drawbacks of particular tools and techniques. The following projects have been of great pedagogical use to me: https://github.com/google/makani (Bazel, C, testing, architecture, real-time control, code-generation) https://github.com/odriverobotics/ODrive (real-time control, code-generation, C++) https://github.com/FreeRTOS/FreeRTOS-Kernel (architecture, C) https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf (architecture, C, CMake, testing) Which embedded software project

Here's some Makani code open-sourced by Google: https://github.com/google/makani Here are some flight logs they released: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/bigquer... They also released reports that describe their findings; it's quite detailed (here's part 1 of 3): https://storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/Maka... I don't know what standard we're holding companies to for projects they're shutting down. From my experience, projects that are closing down don't get as much support prioritization, especially when they're deemed unsuccessful. I share your sentiment that we could get even more; it sounds like you're seeing even more interesting things the public is not. I am grateful for what they have provided so far.

I'd say it's very different with X. I looked at the large number of hardware design docs that were open-sourced[1] when they shut down Makani - hell, even the Makani documentary[2] was mostly about hardware (material science, mechanics, aerodynamics) with a some software sprinkled in. 1. https://github.com/google/makani 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd_hEja6bzE

Reminds me of the incredible engineering done by Makani, as told in this 2 hours long autodocumentary [1]. They shut down in 2020 because they didn't see a path towards commercializing their airborne wind turbine. They made a non-assertion pledge on their patents, and open sourced much of their code (simulations, firmware) [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd_hEja6bzE [2] https://github.com/google/makani

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...

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 [1], flight logs [2] for every crosswind flight of the M600 prototype, technical videos [3], a new simulation tool called KiteFAST [4] created with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and a non-assertion pledge [5] for the free use of Makani’s worldwide patent portfolio. I just wanna say that this -- all of it, the entire paragraph! -- is absolutely amazing (well, except for the end of the company, of course). --- [0]: ht

Some 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.