#HumansOfZipline - Lieven Leroy (5th from right) is a lead on our #Embedded #Engineering team. Here, he shares how we approach testing at Zipline. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ “Our drones need to do more than look good in demonstration. They must be a safe, practical solution. My favorite images of our Zips are the ones that aren’t as shiny as they once were but are still reliably delivering. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Ensuring hardware reliability requires both life cycle testing on prototypes, & quality tests on our manufacturing line. Just like the Zips, a lot of the testers were dreamt up & built here. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Our back lot looks like Muppet Labs. There’s a pneumatic rig that’s constantly twisting struts from our recovery system, looking for failure points. Mechanical eng. converted a shipping container into a climate chamber (we make it snow in there!). I have a plexiglass cage where I can strap in one of our Zips, connect my laptop, & run full throttle motor tests. For manufacturing, we’ve built things like a mini...