Firmware Specialist - Avery Bainbridge

Avery Bainbridge, Nova’s Firmware Specialist.

Last week, we introduced you to Nova’s Technical Artist, Phu Le. You got to hear a little more about the work that is going into Demo 2…but our 3D models are only the start of what’s cooking. There is still so much else we have going on at Nova: this week, you will be learning more about another critical member of our team, Avery Bainbridge, who serves as Nova’s Firmware Specialist!

Avery is in charge of taking the rest of the team’s code and putting it all together on the “Jetson.” The Jetson is the name of Hail Bopp’s onboard computer. It is a small version of any other computer, with CPU processors, graphics processors, and a huge assortment of other bits and bobs. The powerful GPU’s in the Jetson are not just for games; in fact, they are in charge of a very a large portion of the thinking that our vehicle does! Avery’s job is to ensure that all of the code created by our team works together seamlessly with the Jetson, along with ensuring the data sent to the Jetson from our onboard sensors interfaces correctly with our systems.

Avery hails from Boise, Idaho, and brings a wealth of experience to this position. In high school, Avery was a member of the FIRST Robotics Competitions (FRC) for four years, and spent a huge amount of time working on microcontroller projects on his own time. He learned the tricks of the trade through countless hours of work in robotics and vision processing: in his own words, “Quite a bit of what you expect when you program is that you have an operating system underneath you. They helped you out. You have to learn sort of how to do without it when you’re doing microcontroller programming.”

In the past few weeks, Avery has been working on integrating the GPS receiver from Hail Bopp into workable code for the rest of the team. The written code from our team talks to our GPS modules and needs to receive back workable position and velocity data to interface with the rest of the systems in the vehicle. Interfacing this code is not trivial: there are an enormous amount of issues to solve before any of this data can be usable for us. Differences in communication protocols, changing the GPS’ positioning function from an ellipsoid to a reference geoid, properly passing the latitude, longitude, and altitude data to the localization stack to be processed…All of this information is needed to give Hail Bopp a “ground truth” to determine its exact position in space. Avery is the man responsible for making it all happen.

Avery at work in the Nova lab.

Avery’s work has become a bedrock for the project, and has been essential to getting us up and running this semester. In recognition of his excellent work, Avery is the first recipient of Nova’s weekly award…our rubber chicken! Avery will hold onto this prize for a grand total of one week before it is passed on to next week’s Nova Member of the Week.

Avery being recognized with Nova’s extra-special rubber chicken.

Avery wants students to remember that in technology, underneath all of the high-level functionality and capability they possess that seem like magic, there is an enormous amount of work that goes into the essential functions of the product. Underneath the higher level abstractions of the product, “It’s not magic, and that there are real people such as myself.” He wants to remind students that underneath all of the code and functions, to quote Isaac Newton, “Don’t forget that you’re working on the shoulders of giants.” Nova constantly relies on Avery to keep everything on the right track, and we cannot do our work without him!