# @zipline on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/CSBu-qGg4HB
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/70712920-zipline-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/51e18e5140.jpg
- **Posted:** 2021-08-01T09:40:19.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Zipline (@zipline) — https://gondola.cc/zipline

## Caption

#HumansOfZipline - Lieven Leroy (5th from right) is a lead on our #Embedded #Engineering team. Here, he shares how we approach testing at Zipline.
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“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.
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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.
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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 wind tunnel to test our airspeed module at 100kph. All that & more may be running at the same time. It’s the most fun I’ve had in my software career!
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A few years ago, our drone propellers were experiencing issues during flights only in Rwanda. We hypothesized that this was due to high elevation in Rwanda (most places over 1 mile/1.6 km above sea level). Why? In thinner air, propellers need to spin faster to get enough thrust, & this was causing the issue. How do you test that? Zoltan modified a big pressure cooker - a pot with a lid and a valve. Inside, he mounted our motor & propeller module. He would suck air out of the pot to simulate high altitude. That rig let us figure out the failure point, try new designs, and get a fix to the field. It’s an example of the great, cheap solutions that let us constantly improve our vehicle.
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That’s just some of the hardware testing. For software, we have built our own simulation systems. When COVID kept many of us home, we could still run tests on real flight hardware thanks to our hardware-in-the-loop rigs.”

## Stats

- **Views:** 0
- **Likes:** 374
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- **Comments:** 1

## Tags

humansofzipline, engineering, embedded

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