The future is lagging.
Collins Aerospace
During onboarding, I was tasked to learn about the company and how the systems they make on a plane work. A lot of it was in regards to safety, in particular in my department was a new version of TCAS. Which then led me to the real assignment to interface an AFDX – Avionics Full Duplex Switched Ethernet pcie card they made with the Xilinx ZCU106 development board.
Culprit: Hardware
Just like starting with any development board I started watching guides and reading documents and manuals as to how it works. An employee who had been working on the new firmware was guiding me on how it worked and how it was loaded onto the board. For a few weeks I would attempt a connection with PCIE communications and they would fail. I would review jumpers and cards in the board that would be required for PCIE to work. All seemed to check out.
I then started to review the drivers more thoroughly and the setup process to see if it was being initialized properly. This took up several more weeks of learning about initializations and their overlapping procedures.
Towards the end of the summer I started looking into the FPGA and how it effected things. Although it appeared to be initialized, there may be conflicts and more settings than could be seen from the IDE. At this point I was given a new task since learning how to reprogram the FPGA would take far too long. I finished the summer comparing some old and new code for the PCIE communication on how it would need to be adapted in their new firmware. I made extensive notes for each line that was different to help whoever had to take on that role. I wasn't able to complete the original task, but I narrowed down what the problem was tremendously.
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