Building a missile from scratch
My biggest project at Mach was building a small missile we called the "EDF hopper". "EDF" because the missile propels itself via electric ducted fan and "hopper" because the vehicle wasn't isn't intended to fly into the air like a rocket, but instead to hover right above the ground.
Mach's flagship product was a large cruise missile called Viper. However, the hardware for Viper wasn't completed. I developed the EDF Hopper as a simple test bed to develop software for Viper, without the hardware complications of Viper
I built nearly every part of this test bed, including the flight controller and ground control station from scratch.
Engineering Process
A flight controller is the "brain" of the missile.
It's the little computer that
a) listens for sensor data from our IMUs and GPSs
b) decides how much thrust to give the jet and what angle to have on the wings
c) sends commands to the jet and to the servos on the drone's wings
d) communicates back to the drone operator's computer about the drone's status.
I built the entire flight controller in Rust. The code runs on a Pixhawk flight controller board, meaning it runs on an STM32 chip.
Here's a video of my EDF Hopper vehicle doing it's very first flight... this was the culmination of ~4 months of engineering 14 hours/day. I was very excited if you can't tell :)
It's hard to explain everything I did, but just trust me, writing a computer program to make a rectangular prism float in the air is really freaking hard.
Here's an earlier video of me running the EDF hopper on a test rig. Obviously the final hopper, as shown above, is able to float completely unspported. We call this 6-degrees of freedom, for yaw, pitch, roll, x-axis, y-axis, and z-axis. However, the test rig allowed the hopper to be constrained on several axes. I used the test hopper before moving onto the unconstrained hopper. It made initial development easier, because I didn't have to tune controls for six axes all at once.
How it began
I met Ethan, the founder of Mach, when he had just left MIT. The very first time we met, over dinner, he explained to me the tyranny us and the world would face if America were overpowered. Worse yet—he showed me how woefully unprepared the US arsenal was for such a conflict. This inspired me to join Mach as one of the first team members.
