nasa-ingenuity-helicopter VS fprime

I found out last weekend that one of the Open Source code projects I contribute to is being used to help fly the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. I think it's really awesome that I, along with a ton of other people, contributed in some small way to a freaking helicopter flying on Mars. Diabetes be damned!

> The University's financial position remains strong with assets of $6.3 billion, an increase of $0.2 billion from fiscal year 2017

In the end to me it seems the value realized in this could not be a demonstrateably improved kernel patch review process without another non-consensual round of buggy patch submissions so it is very important to consider precedent and posture now. Arguably the immediate value realized has been the identification of a number of (historically) maybe not so great collaborators.

> Another lesson is something we already knew: kernel maintainers (and maintainers of many other free-software projects) are overworked and do not have the time to properly review every patch that passes through their hands. They are, as a result, forced to rely on the trustworthiness of the developers who submit patches to them.

Spot on.

> The kernel development process is, arguably, barely sustainable when that trust is well placed; it will not hold together if incoming patches cannot, in general, be trusted.

Hold off on that pessimism, we got a great thing going here and on the way to Mars, pat on the back:

> https://github.com/readme/nasa-ingenuity-helicopter

I did read the apology, it is a good apology, as a member of "Linux communities" (linux from 15yo) apology accepted. My intent is not to harm any reputations but clearly communicate my belief in the need to consider how this research may be used as precedent.

GitHub posted a really cool article about how open source powered Ingenuity: https://github.com/readme/nasa-ingenuity-helicopter. In there is a link to a list of all the projects used as well!

Open Source on Mars: Community powers NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter. Nearly 12,000 people contributed code, documentation, graphic design, and more to the open source software that made Ingenuity’s launch possible. To celebrate this moment in open source history, GitHub added a new badge to profiles of those contributors. [GITHUB]

This post goes into a little more detail on what was used and its purpose: https://github.com/readme/nasa-ingenuity-helicopter

Does anyone have any suggestions for learning to write flight software or have any resources to learn from? I'm not necessarily looking for a framework to learn either, unless you think I should be focusing on something like https://nasa.github.io/fprime/. At this point, I don't know what I don't know... what should I be focusing on?

F´ (F Prime) is originally developed at JPL, which is written under the C++11 standard. The linked video should be based on JPL Institutional Coding Standard for the C Programming Language, which is a guideline for C. They should be using C++11 nowadays.

The navigation camera is something you can buy online, the other terrain camera is a Sony IMX 214, The flight software is on github, the altimeter is from sparkfun.

[1] https://github.com/nasa/fprime

Probes and satellites either user custom made os, or proprietary real time OS like VxWorks, or more recently open source fprime.