[EPIC] Drone Relay Development #123
Description
This issue is a decently large design and implementation challenge, and as such there are multiple steps that need to be taken into account to actually be able to deliver this in a way that's non-hacky and maintainable.
First, read the Drone Report to familiarize yourself with the context of the problem. Specifically, check out the Relay > Software section to understand the gist of where we're headed with this idea.
The hardware you will be working with is the Feather Duo, which will provide you 2 radios to communicate between the rocket and ground hardware. Some of the system requirements are outlined below. Keep in mind these may change, and are dependent on the hardware that the team has for any given launch.
- (1) The relay system must be able to support AT LEAST 2 stages of a vehicle if necessary, but prototypes can support single-stage or single-tracking flights.
- (2) The relay system must be always listening to the rocket's data, not "splitting attention" between the vehicle's stages (If more hardware is needed we will use more hardware)
- (3) The relay must be able to cache vehicle data for retransmission to the ground after long flights. This can be done by storing vehicle packets in a queue or just retransmitting the last packet.
- (4) The ground system must support reading from the drone data, but drone data should not interfere with data gotten directly from the vehicle.
- (5) Integration with the relay system must be similarly simple as integration with basic rocket data reception.