[pierrekin]

In the UK, we had a smaller scale model of the aircraft that we used for testing. The team that built the scale model was having trouble configuring the autopilot and I volinteered to help

They were using an off the shelf 'drone' autopilot based on an open source project PX4, which I had some experience with.

I was asked to visit the location with the prototypes and spent the weekend trying to get their RF, magnetometer and GPS calibrated and working with their carbon composite prototype in the way.

I was expecting that they would already have an expert working on this, but instead I found some very senior hyper specialised engineers that were experts on helicopter rotor design for example, but could literally not read the instructions on an FTDI based usb to serial cable and connect their laptops to the autopilot.

It was a classic situation where you connect the projector in english class and the teacher thinks you're the next Donald Knuth.