>>14288977>>14288989Reading about this, because it's at least a little bit interesting, you really cannot call any part of Ingenuity COTS by any definition that sane people would use. What JPL did do, presumably for the first time, quote
>With a technology demo, JPL is willing to try new ways of doing things. So we essentially went out and used a lot of off-the-shelf consumer hardware.Now what it means is basically this.
>We use a cellphone-grade IMU, a laser altimeter (from SparkFun), and a downward-pointing VGA camera for monocular feature tracking. I can only assume the conversation went something like this
>Jim: Hey, people take pictures of stuff and measure how far away things are all the time, do you think we could just do that instead of remaking every single piece of hardware that has ever existed from first principles for millions of taxpayer dollars?>All: *Hissing an shrinking away from Jim*>Senior executive: *Screams and leaps from a window*>*glass breaks*>*child sobbing*>Project manager: Jim, we're gonna have to take you off the Perserverance project, you're gonna work in the basement with those Ingenuity people from now onIt does use some COTS parts, but quote
>There are some avionics components that are very tough and radiation resistantThe rotors of course are an entirely custom design, as is the frame, I imagine most of the radios, etc. A brave step forward for JPL, sure, but this isn't how anyone uses this words. If I was contracted to deliver something cheaply using COTS parts and I came back with this, I would be killed on the spot.
