Over the winter break and the last 4 weeks, we've been making steady progress on our project. We've been delayed constantly by shipping challenges, but with all parts on the way and tasks for everyone to work on, we're still on track to deliver.

We've had to move some of the public demonstrations to summer just to make the timeline fit, but we're still able to deliver 2 vehicles on the target deadline of may.

Team photo before Winter Break!

Winter Break to Feb 6th

While ordering parts over winter break has lead to delays, we've alleviated it by moving work to what we can do, while waiting for the remainder of the components to arrive! Some of our testing components have arrived and are currently undergoing rigorous testing, including the Camera, Camera processor, motors, and control software.

Vision Software Progress

Photo of the Raspberry Pi taken by the Raspberry Pi SWIR camera

We're making progress integrating open-source software into the camera module and system to gather the data we're looking for. Since the thermal sensor has also arrived, we should be able to start collecting test data relativity quickly. Mixing Longwave + Shortwave + Visual band camera data is going to be a top priority of our software development unit. Previous camera designs called for a SONY STARVIS sensor, but due to integration complexity with MIPI CSI-2 we jumped to an OMNIVISION OV56__ sensor. We will be switching back to SONY STARVIS after the semester ends for future generations of the project.

Motor & Battery Testing Rig

Electrical components of our test rig. Mechanical components are in fabrication.

In order to compare the thrust and effectiveness of our motors, and to make sure we don't have any manufacturing defects, efficiency gaps, or other perceived issues, we decided in January to add thrust and battery testing to our list of tests. Our motor engineer is putting together a list of equipment to test our newly arrived motors, and we will have that ready to demonstrate in the next couple of weeks.

PID Control Simulator 

Stock Velocidrone PID rates. Our PID rates and config files are still being discovered.

We've been using Velocidrone and Liftoff to generate valid PID controls, and throwing beginner pilots behind the sticks to get an accurate estimate of what our PID will be on the actual quadcopter. We are using Velocidrone to make sure beginners do not accidently use full thrust on the drone, and potentially damage the drone on first use, as well as testing the drone in situations we see it in. We have been using various maps, particularly the map "Quarantine", "Night Factory", and "Subway" to mimic environments users would be dealing with. It's given us a lot of data. 

Thermal Redesign for Component Housing

We reached out to Dr. Hadi Ghasemi and Dr. Dong Liu for help in looking over our component redesign, having taken the MECE's consideration that thermal problems will occur in the sealed, 3d printed, water tight box. Dr. Ghasemi was very helpful and provided for us the track to developing the heat equations necessary to calculate the surface area needed. Based on our current calculations, a flat aluminum panel should be good enough for thermal control, so we will be using that for the moment unless heat sinks are required. This finally allows us to design the casing for the electronic components, which we are now doing.

Pilot controller problems

Unfortunately, our primary selection for the handheld controller is no longer in manufacturing, as the manufacturer, Jumper, wanted to move everyone over to their generation 2 platform. We are going to do a focus group with some officers to see what they are willing to have as a replacement, and we are scheduling that meeting to be sometime in February. In the meantime, we have hacked together a off the shelf controller to meet our current demands.

Future Plans

Over the next couple of weeks, and with all of our components arriving or arrived, we hope to begin running full system integration tests and put together ground testing of all electric components. Getting thermal data, control data, and other priority data on the ground is a necessity before we begin making final components, just to make sure we have everything down correct. We'll finally be at the point of integrating Thermal camera technology and getting our operational capacity ready. And we hope to start flying around Mid-March.

Notes from the CEO:

Over the last couple of months I have been extremely proud of our engineering team, who has been constantly pushing the boundary of what we can achieve and working long nights to make it happen. However, I feel as if we have been neglecting our sales and directed management portion of our company. This is outside of the scope of our CAPSTONE work, but just 1-2 groups isn't enough, we either need a confirmed sale or a direct deployment soon in order to compete with our near-peer adversaries, which are BRINC drones and Paladin technologies. We know we have the computing and tech power to beat them. We are not going to beat them if we don't start trying to. We need to make progress on that immediately.

Sincerely, 
Bernard Li, CEO

"Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."

-  Admiral Sauveterre, The Expanse, Nemesis Games