pico-tracker/firmware

Bristol Pico Tracker

Firmware for the Bristol Pico Tracker. Gets its GPS position home by whatever means possible, come hell or high water.

(Actually, come low temperatures, long paths, geopolitical restrictions, low power etc.)

Technical Description

The firmware is written in C and targeted at the highly configurable Atmel SAMD20 series of ARM Cortex M0+ micromontrollers. The code can be built using GNU Tools for ARM Embedded Processors. See README-samd20-gcc-blackmagic.md for more details.

Developement Framework

Separate developement hardware exists, this has a separate MCU for current and voltage measurement, as well controling the voltage at the step-up input.

This is part of the development framework.

The other part of the framework is several 'development scripts' that are still TODO

Verification Framework

The verification suite ultimately allows a single command to return a PASS/FAIL vertict on the readiness of the system to fly. There should be no user input required during the tests - A test case that requires user input is actually a development script.

REAL_HARDWARE

If this flag is set, the test scripts can presume the MCU has full access to real flight hardware.

Otherwise the tests must presume that their target is just the MCU on a developement board and set-up any required test harnesses as appropriate.

DYNAMIC_TESTS

If this flag is set, then the test cases may use dynamic data from the internet or other sources to test the tracker's performance in current real-world conditions. This may even include uploading the resulting test data to habhub or similar.

Otherwise test cases must be perfectly deterministic and repeatable. Using psudo-random sequences to generate test data is acceptable, as long as a constant seed is used.

LONG_TEST

If this flag is set, then the test case may make as many iterations it feels it needs for a full and thorough test.

Otherwise test cases must take less than 1 second of real world runtime.

Sources & Licensing

See LICENSE.md