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Makani source code released
- purpleidea 6y agoI guess this means that this project is dead or not viable for some reason, and they're being nice and releasing their work. Good job Google! As an aside, it should be law to release any firmware, code, and backend services code for any device that is no longer fully supported by the manufacturer. Let other people play with your dead things and reduce the barrier for new innovation on top of them.
- UncleOxidant 6y agoGoogle stopped funding Makani several months back. I'm not sure how applicable most of this code will be for other kite power companies. The Makani "kite" turbine was 2000 lbs. It definitely required Google-level funding to develop which is now gone. None of the remaining kite power companies that I'm aware of have the kind of significant funding required to develop this - ours ran out of money late last year.
- tobinfricke 6y ago> The Makani "kite" turbine was 2000 lbs. Essentially the same code could run Makani's smaller machine, the 20 kilowatt "Wing 7", with a 7.8 meter wingspan and a mass of 60 kg. Many of the existing kite power companies are working on machines of this scale. But we did have the luxury to design and build the system from the ground up, whereas scrappier startups might have to cobble together existing components. Hopefully they will be able to utilize some of the materials we've just released.
- londons_explore 6y agoSo what's to stop me cobbling together something like the Wing 7 and just leaving it unattended in a field to launch and generate whenever the wind conditions are suitable? If I did, and I got typical government subsidies for wind power, I might earn $10k/year. That ought to pay for all the machines parts if I buy everything hobby grade from AliExpress. The 2nd year is pure profit assuming the craft lasts that long. So that leads me to suspect the key issue is the various control algorithms can't be made reliable enough to run for years and years without crashing under any combination of gusts and wind conditions. Am I along the right lines of the issues?
- krisoft 6y agoThe FAA (or your local alternative) might want to check your paperwork and licensing too.
- londons_explore 6y agoWhile it stays tethered to the ground, I don't believe the FAA would be interested? Am I mistaken?
- pas 6y agoIt depends on how high it gets, because even high buildings/structures can be problematic. (They need a blinky light of course, but maybe more importantly a radar reflector.)
- desdiv 6y agoA tethered unmanned aircraft is still considered an aircraft by the FAA and subject to FAA regulations: https://plane-lyspoken.foxrothschild.com/2017/12/03/tethered-v-untethered/ https://plane-lyspoken.foxrothschild.com/2017/12/03/tethered...
- tobinfricke 6y agoMakani engaged early with FAA and we had a great working relationship. This enabled us to move out of China Lake (where we were using the military's restricted airspace, which didn't require FAA approval) and out into the public airspace in Hawaii. We did several test flights in close collaboration with FAA observers, developing a color scheme for the tether and a lighting system for the kite and ground station that were deemed adequately conspicuous. We also held a round-table with local pilots to get their input. Ultimately we operated under a "determination of no hazard" that classified the Makani system as an obstruction, something like a large radio tower. Our COO gave a talk on the FAA approval process at the Airborne Wind Energy Conference (AWEC) a few years ago: https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:ea8256a2-2c52-402e-a72f-fd60b0794c6b/datastream/OBJ/download https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:ea8256a2...
- 6y ago
- canofbars 6y agoI think the main obstacle is these things often contain licensed code the company does not have permission to open source.
- tobinfricke 6y agoThat's right; or the IP gets sold to someone and never sees the light of day. Think of BeOS (sold to Palm Inc) etc.
- UncleOxidant 6y agoIt's cool that they open sourced this, but as someone who worked at a kite power company (a much smaller company with a much smaller kite) I'm not sure much here will be transferable to other companies. Makani was making a huge 2000 lb "kite" turbine. That requires the kind of money that Google could back them with - and since Google isn't funding this anymore I just don't see where this can go as none of the remaining kite power companies have much funding (ours ran out of money late last year).
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoI don't think the goal here is to help other kite power companies. If google thought there was still something there they'd still be funding the project in all likelihood. But who knows what this might teach someone trying to move into a related space? Also it's just freaking cool that this stuff is available.
- UncleOxidant 6y agoIt was very much a blue-sky project. A very highly ambitious one. Other kite power companies are generally taking much more affordable routes by necessity.
- Kye 6y agoOpening it up makes it available to people who might look at it and get an idea. Sometimes the thing has to be available before someone figures out what to do with it.
- UncleOxidant 6y agoOh sure, I completely understand that. The point I was trying to make was that all of this flight control & simulation software is very specific to the characteristics of their particular kite. I'm not aware of anyone else in the industry making a kite that large and heavy - most of these companies are operating on a shoestring budget. Sure, it's possible that maybe some general ideas could be obtained from their autonomous control software - but they would need to be heavily adapted to a different kite with different flight characteristics. We were starting to think about using reinforcement learning to develop an autonomous controller for our kite. That would have involved recording lots of real-world in-flight data for our particular kite which we were starting to do. Similar flight data for a different kite wouldn't have done us much good when it came to training as each kite has very different flight characteristics.
- bruckie 6y agoThere's also (quite surprisingly!) a feature-length film that talks about Makani's work over the last 13 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd_hEja6bzE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd_hEja6bzE
- DetroitThrow 6y agoBeautiful documentary, thanks for sharing.
- nikodunk 6y agoAmazing stuff. Just made my Saturday night.
- ibiuebeii 6y agoVery enjoyable documentary, thanks!
- cheesedoodle 6y agoIncredible document about a fascinating workplace!
- keizo 6y agoI wonder if this could be repurposed to kite sail large cargo ships.
- tobinfricke 6y agoThat was indeed an application investigated by Makani! I think some companies are still pursuing this.
- keizo 6y agoI wonder why it didn’t go anywhere. But maybe a difficult industry to interrupt. Google or an org with that kind of money should buy an cargo ship and just make it happen.
- msoad 6y agoWhy this failed? I would love to learn more if anyone has more insider knowledge
- potiuper 6y agohttps://jacquesmattheij.com/makani/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/makani/
- brandmeyer 6y agoThe tether replaces one set of problems with a different set of problems. Some of the new problems had promising solutions, but others were more marginal. 1) Land use. The small props are loud, and the setbacks relative to populated areas are pretty high for tether and crash safety. Solution: offshore. Now you have two problems :) 2) The tether's weight is a factor. Its hard to build in much margin on this component before it gets too heavy to fly. What happens if a gust temporarily reduces tension on the tether? Can it handle a shock load from the kite hits the end again if it comes off its sphere? How many conductors can you run down the tether? IIRC, they were running DC+ and DC-... with no ground. Now, what exactly happens during lightning strike? At the time they believed that they were just barely on the "feasible" side for this component on a feasible-infeasible axis, but it was pretty darned close. 3) The power system was complex. Tether weight biases you strongly towards a medium voltage power system (a few kV pole-to-pole) to cut down on the weight of the conductors. However, the size of the turbine was smaller than any medium voltage application I had ever heard of. Maybe the ground side could be COTS, but the flight side almost certainly couldn't. So now you are also in the business of building bespoke medium-voltage switching power converters and motor/generators. There's nothing fundamentally infeasable about this, its just a bunch of hard work that detracts somewhat from the main mission. A startup would much rather buy this tech, but they were forced to build it instead. I mention the power system explicitly because that's particularly in my bailiwick, but I think it was really a microcosm of the project as a whole. They were building an airplane for the purpose of energy production. So they had to solve all of the problems that an airplane company has to solve. Also, since electricity is so cheap, you can't afford to pay human operators for all of the generators, so you also must solve many of the problems that an autonomous airplane company has to solve. In salty air to boot. Overall, there's just a staggering amount of NRE that must be spent chasing a market that is already commoditized. 50 USD/MW-hr is a typical benchmark for wholesale electricity. Meanwhile, solar panels are iterating and getting cheaper and traditional wind turbines are iterating and getting cheaper. Eventually, the bean-counters start to notice. There's an alternative explanation: Makani (and Wing, and Titan, and the robotics initiative, and other things) were initiated when Larry was still young and excited about the technology itself. We used to morbidly joke that Ruth Porat (hired CFO) was going around the company asking questions like, "Airplanes, Larry? Really?" (taps clipboard, raises eyebrow). Eventually the long years of almost-but-not-quite-success wore them down past the point of endurance, and the projects started dying off when the leadership got bored of them. IMO, both explanations are likely to be true.
- jefftk 6y agoBlog post from February when Alphabet withdrew funding: https://blog.x.company/a-long-and-windy-road-f8e09d02c9e1 https://blog.x.company/a-long-and-windy-road-f8e09d02c9e1 (Disclosure: I work for Google)
- lowiqengineer 6y agoWas the "disclosure" necessary, or are you just flexing?
- renewiltord 6y agoLike half of all people on this site are at FAANG+MS so it's not a flex but some people always flip out when you're at one of the big ones and you don't say so when linking to company media.
- jefftk 6y agoMaybe not? But I've seen people here get mad at other employees for not disclosing, so I do it to be on the safe side.
- lowiqengineer 6y agoI’ve never seen anyone from my company disclose, which has way more engineers.
- ladberg 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24266369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24266369
- lowiqengineer 6y ago...only because other folks implicitly look down on me
- jlam 6y ago
- hlandau 6y agoAny chance on board schematics, or even just some basic block diagram of the avionics hardware? It's hard to understand this firmware without having any idea what it ran on.
- tobinfricke 6y agoAsk away and I'll tell you what I can. :-) You'll find some description here (but no schematics): https://storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/Makani_TheEnergyKiteReport_Part2.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/Maka...
- ntucker86 6y agothe system overview slides in... part II? pretty sure there is a top level avionics layout in there.
- person_of_color 6y agoWhat happened to the Makani refugees at G?
- tobinfricke 6y agoMany found new positions in Alphabet/X, and others found new positions at outside companies. Yet others still are either taking a break or still looking.
- person_of_color 6y agoAnd you?
- tobinfricke 6y agoI had the privilege of being part of the documentation team preparing some of the materials that were released yesterday (in particular: the code and the chapter on the autopilot/control system). Now I'm taking a little break but I hope to start something new around January. Definitely open to ideas. :-)
- person_of_color 6y agohttps://observer.com/2019/12/apple-new-satellite-project-wireless-service-spacex-starlink/ https://observer.com/2019/12/apple-new-satellite-project-wir...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- meekrohprocess 6y agoNeat! If I'm reading the repository right, it looks like the avionics firmware ran on a TMS570 Cortex-R microcontroller made by TI: https://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Category:TMS570 https://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Category:TMS570 I'm pleasantly surprised to see that instead of a big Cortex-A or x86/64 chip. It's cool to read well-funded code for a small realtime SoC. you don't see them too often outside of things like memory controllers and safety-critical products, but Cortex-R chips can have some cool features like ECC memories and mirrored CPUs: https://developer.arm.com/ip-products/processors/cortex-r/cortex-r5 https://developer.arm.com/ip-products/processors/cortex-r/co... Apparently the next generation Cortex-R82s will also have 64-bit options with an MMU, which should make it easy to run a "real" OS. Too bad that the company didn't work out, but it was nice of them to publish this stuff.
- elromulous 6y agoNot entirely true. The actual autopilot (the controller + estimator) runs on an imx6. The tms570 are the sensor / actuator nodes. Edit: just to add some detail. The autopilot and aio (avionics io, i.e. the tmd570s) communicate over a ring ethernet topology.
- meekrohprocess 6y agoOh, that makes sense. It did seem like a lot for such a small processor to handle. Still, that sounds even cooler; a reference for how to set up a local network of MCUs controlled by a big processor? Awesome.
- sjburt 6y agoThis topology is very common. Hard real-time sensor nodes feeding softer real-time big iron that does the estimation and control.
- sgtnoodle 6y agoThe TMS570 has a decent amount of computing power on it for a microcontroller. The CPU core itself seems pretty solid. Unfortunately, the peripheral set is incredibly painful to develop for because it's riddled with poorly thought out registers and silicon bugs. For low volume stuff, the chance of a detectable miscalculation occuring in the field is low, while the chance of a firmware bug causing a failure is high. Using a TMS570 for a hobby project would be a very poor choice. With a sufficiently high volume project, though, the development pain can be worth it. The redundant cross checked CPU cores gives you piece of mind that the thing will self-diagnose a miscalculation and report it, rather than go off into the weeds. It enables you to responsibly design safety critical fault tolerant systems based on explicit handoff from one MCU to another. Without the cross checking, you can't trust a single MCU to act rationally; in designs like that, you typically need more than two MCUs with majority voting circuitry. So the TMS570 can help reduce total system complexity at the cost of lower level firmware pain.
- elromulous 6y agoFormer Makanite, and current abc employee here. Happy to answer questions.
- haditab 6y agoHow did you feel about the project being shut down? Did you feel like you still had work to be done or was there a feeling that this just isn't going to work?
- elromulous 6y agoThe usual disclaimer: these views are my own, and do not represent Makani, abc, etc. I was terribly disappointed the project was shutdown. The engineering problems were unique and challenging. And the team was absolutely world class. I felt like we could do it. And I wish we were still at it. But that's purely from the technical side. I wasn't involved in things like budget, and whether it would be economically viable.
- season2episode3 6y agoI never knew about this project. It would have been my dream job.
- tobinfricke 6y agoIt was a dream job! Not sure what to do next.
- sarthakjshetty 6y agoWhat are some of the surprising/unforseen aspects of working on this hard tech problem?
- grizzles 6y agowhy wasn't the turbine hung off an airship?
- winrid 6y agoSome of the code for the tools is fun to read https://github.com/google/makani/blob/c421e4497dd09c86b0172521b54b9a7c81cc31c9/analysis/cfd-tools/cfd_aero_runner/AeroCFDRunner/WindTunnelAnalysis.java 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.
- greesil 6y agoAccording to GitHub this project is less than 3% Java. It's mostly C++, C, and Python
- tobinfricke 6y agoThat'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/crosswind 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/rigid_bodies/wing.cc https://github.com/google/makani/blob/master/sim/models/rigi...
- ZephyrBlu 6y agoOther than it being a 2400 line file, what's wrong with the Java code?
- tonyhb 6y agoThe commenting here is actually pretty dope. I really enjoy the small notes saying _why_ the code exists: // because all low speed wind tunnel cases are overset and all high speed are // fixed with a remesh, we only rotate in the presence of overset domains. This is something that personally I strive to do but isn't always repeated in my team. It's important as 6 months later you struggle to remember the nuance that lead to your code being written. Whoever this is seems to have experience with this, so I definitely wouldn't say this is an inexperienced dev.
- jlgaddis 6y agoFrom https://x.company/projects/makani/ 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]: https://blog.x.company/a-long-and-windy-road-f8e09d02c9e1 https://blog.x.company/a-long-and-windy-road-f8e09d02c9e1 [1]: https://github.com/google/makani https://github.com/google/makani [2]: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/bigquery-public-datasets/makani-logs https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/bigquer... [3]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7og_3Jqea4VRCZmMNK4LDH64sYgkLZzv https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7og_3Jqea4VRCZmMNK4L... [4]: https://github.com/rafmudaf/openfast/tree/kitefast https://github.com/rafmudaf/openfast/tree/kitefast [5]: https://storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/Makani%20Non-Assertion%20Pledge.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/Maka...
- cloudwalking 6y agoX is what Google used to be.
- nikitaga 6y agoX is still X and Google is still Google. Outside of X, Google was never known for crazy moonshots. Google was always an ad platform with a search engine.
- bayindirh 6y agoX was Google X, now it's Alphabet X. Google was Google, now it's Alphabet Google. Google was the name of the search engine and the company. Now the company name has changed, everything is restructured and Google is an ad platform with a search engine. "X Development LLC. is an American semi-secret research and development facility and organization founded by Google in January 2010, which now operates as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. X has its headquarters about a mile and a half from Alphabet's corporate headquarters, the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California."[0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(company)
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoI ran the code and took some screenshots of the really nice web UI. Simple and inspiring since I've been working on a robot web UI recently. Here's some screenshots of the Makani interface: https://imgur.com/gallery/NMjBJSY https://imgur.com/gallery/NMjBJSY
- tobinfricke 6y agoAwesome! You might be the first outside of Makani to run the code. :-) I'm glad you were able to get it up and running. Please let us know if you have any questions or run into any trouble.
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoHah cool! Yeah I was hoping the simulator was a 3D sim environment I could use with my off road robot, but it was actually still really helpful even though it wasn’t that. I have been making a robot web UI and all your graphs and debug data give me ideas on more data I want to pipe up to the UI, and some improvements I can make to allow automatic UI elements from certain data structures. :) Here’s one of my robots: https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/ https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/
- tobinfricke 6y agoThat rover is super cool - good work! We were just beginning to experiment with computer vision to augment/replace GPS at the time we were shut down.
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoThank you! You can certainly get a lot done with RTK, but computer vision is a big fun technical whale.
- luislarco 6y agoThat’s awesome! What OS did you use to run it? Did you do native installation or use docker?
- someonehere 6y agoAll of their assets were liquidated in their Alameda location. I bought some power tools from the auction went to pick it up and saw this really long wing span in a hangar. I asked the people with the liquidators what it was and they told me it was used for power. Then I remembered reading about this company in Wired many years ago and felt it would be something cool. Well I own some power tools they used to use so that’s as close to having their history with me.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoHow do you find out about these auctions, generally speaking?
- tobinfricke 6y agoI heard that one of our wings (SN1) will be incorporated into a playground somewhere on the Big Island of Hawaii (where someone bought it at auction). It would be fun to hear what comes of our other stuff.
- rootsudo 6y agoSelf Flying Energy Kite Self Flying Energy Drone Interesting stuff.
- rubicon33 6y agoIncredibly ambitious project. I watched the whole documentary. I'm surprised they were 'unable to secure additional funding'. Considering how many crackpot app-of-the-month companies have gotten cash thrown at them over the last decade, you would think a company doing real engineering would be drowning in money. It's a bummer to hear that they folded. Speculation abounds, I suppose, as to why investors started (or kept) saying "no."
- arbitel 6y agoWhen investors look to invest, they want a fast ROI. Engineering company likes this typically takes many years to fruition or maybe not. It's much easier to justify dumping money on these "tech" companies like WeWork, AirBnb hoping to get another facebook unicorn than putting money into real engineering company like Makani.
- ubertoop 6y agoPersonally I find that troubling for the progress of humanity. We need big money (resources) to solve real challenging engineering problems. Unfortunately it seems like a lot of the big money is going towards less critical 'problems' if problems at all, like social media companies.
- codecamper 6y agoLarry cancelled Makani meanwhile he lands his helicopter on his yacht?
- fluffy87 6y agoWhat was the back of the envelope calculation that suggested this would work?
- pas 6y agoIn the film they explain that since wind turbines extract power based on the area they sweep, their kite would be able to sweep a bigger area more easily. (No need for so much material, no need for a 150m tall tower, etc.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd_hEja6bzE&t=6m40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd_hEja6bzE&t=6m40s
- tobinfricke 6y agoTo be clear: crosswind kite power does work. The question is whether it is economical or competitive. The paper that started it all is this one by Miles Loyd from 1980. It's short enough it could fit on the back of a large envelope. :-) http://edge.rit.edu/edge/P15462/public/CAD/crosswind_kite.pdf http://edge.rit.edu/edge/P15462/public/CAD/crosswind_kite.pd...
- dependenttypes 6y agoI am waiting for them to release the google earth source.