The past 2 weeks have been relatively quiet, but solid progress towards our goals of flight testing and systems testing in the field are being made.
Testing, debugging, and commenting code were done on both the ground station and onboard imaging over the last few weeks with the aim of fixing some persistent bugs and revising code for clarity. This week’s technical demo was of the onboard camera:
Sheldon’s technical demo of the FPV camera with image on a small LCD screen
Sheldon is planning to get the camera mounted to the plane as well as connect it to the plane’s power supply in the next few weeks.
On the airframe front, the foam airplanes for flight testing are complete and ready to fly. The team is continuing to try and find a suitable flying field and time for the foamies. In the meantime, potential pilots are training on the flight simulator:
More flight simulator training with the R/C controller
One of the completed foamies
We also started work on prototyping a new design for the plane’s landing gear mount.
Justin puts his carpentry skills to use
This design is part of several changes we made to the landing gear to increase overall robustness in the light of several accidents with the landing gear that occurred during competition last year.