Some kind of “hardware in the loop”

Today I did my first “HIL-Test”. Ok, a real “Hardware in the loop” might be a little bit more complex.

What I did was to connect my Quadrocopter with two serial interface to my computer. With the first connection I get the quadrocopter internal information to the mac. On the second connection – normally – a gps receiver can be connected to the quadrocopter. Now I implemented a gps simulation on my mac and put these simulated gps data to the quadrocopter. The first connection is now used to see, if the quadrocopter use the gps information in a correct way.

Now I see that this works and on the next step I can check if calculating the home position or the next waypoint is correct. The nice thing is, that the gps simulation allow to get me a moving position without a time-consuming and risky testflight. The other point is, that winter time is not very nice for outdoor tests.

All the code – simulation, quadrocopter firmware and data visualisation – is available on the subversion repository on the project website (http://sourceforge.net/p/opensourcepilot/).