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Comment by nom | Hacker News Reader

Here [0] is the paper describing the hardware of Ingenuity in more detail

Things that stand out to me: It uses mostly off-the-shelf electronic components that are only automotive/industrial grade!

- 2.26 GHz Quad-core Snapdragon 801

- Texas Instruments TMS570LC43x (2x for tolerance)

- Sony 18650 LiIon batteries

- Zig-Bee to communicate with the rover

The only part that is somewhat special is the radiation tolerant FPGA ProASIC3 that ties everything together and takes care of power cycling other components when they lock up.

Too bad that they probably will only fly it a few times as the rover has to move on and it's just a tech demo. I so wish it will follow Perseverance on her mission, that would be so awesome to see. It's certainly capable of doing that!

0: https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2014/46229/CL%2317...

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You made my day! I worked on Snapdragon 801 many years ago.

It doesn't look like Ingenuity is using its GPU for anything, but knowing thet a tiny bit of the work we did is now on another planet fills me with joy.

This must be such a cool feeling.

Congratulations. And thank you.

You know.. thank you.

Considering that Perseverance is running your standard rad hardened PPC from the late 90's, I think that speaks a bit to the expected lifespan and importance of Ingenuity. If the POC goes well, I expect we will see hardened components in the next revision. Then again, if Ingenuity is doing anything too modern, I doubt a PPC 750 will be able to keep up.

How are they doing machine learning with PPC from the late 90s?

With https://github.com/torch/torch7 on https://luajit.org/luajit.html maybe?

It doesn't do machine learning. It does stereo reconstruction, hazard analysis, map generation, and path planning using stuff like D* and Gestalt.

It also physically moves very slowly, which gives the ancient processor time to keep up.

It is the main processor, tying together a number of hardened FPGAs. They’re also old, but the point is they can be reprogrammed from Earth to do whatever NASA needs.

I wonder if the zigbee is simply being used as a serial bridge between a UART on the rover, and the snapdragon 801 on the helicopter?

(reading the pdf, yes it is). I imagine there is not much concern for a urban noise floor or choosing a clean channel, as there might be with city use of zigbee here on the earth. In some places the ISM 900 band can be completely obliterated by smart meters and baby monitors and stuff.

I'm shocked! They used the non-ROHS ProAsic3L(ead)! How dare they?

j/k lol ;-)

You kid, but space applications are one of the specific exemptions to RoHS. Basically because tin whiskers are extra bad in space.. lead solder is still specified here.

Nobody tell him how they power this thing.

Nuclear-powered Linux computers on Mars...

I love Mark Rober’s explanation of this. See the lemon battery video at 9m30s https://youtu.be/a1D-fZP8qJk

Only until they undock it from the rover, then it will have to survive on it's solar panel! It's also probably the 'coolest' linux ever as temps can go down to -100°C on Mars at night and they are only heating the batteries.

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