As Malcolm mentioned in the first blog post, this project started off with a team of six final engineering students in mid-2009. On the avionics side, a rough outline of an avionics system was drawn up by the mechatronics students which included:
- A main micro-processor for general computation
- An inertial measurement system based on gyros and accelerometers
- A pressure based altimeter
- GPS capabilty (based on a serially linked GPS module
- Memory Card (SD) based data storage
- Telemetry Link based on an x-bee serial dongle connection (2-way)
- Servo actuation capability for a minimum of four servos independently
As it turned out, John Stowers at the GRC had already been working on a UAV design which encompassed nearly all of these capabilities and even used many of the same or similar components as had been proposed for the original design. As his project was fully open source, he was kind enough to donate some unpopulated circuit board and all of his code to get us started and avoid alot of unnecessary work. This is where we started off the project; I will describe things since then.
Over the course of the second semester of 2009, Robert Tang, Alex Keall and I spent time populating the circuit boards given to us by John. Robert also redesigned and built certain components including a power supply board and communications boards. The boards can be seen in the photo below; the black PCB's are the boards supplied by John (motherboard, IMU and GPS) while the copper coloured boards and the boards designed by Robert (bottom left - power supply board, top right - comms boards).
Boards for assembly at conclusion of S2 2009Source: Research and Work - Robert Tang
At the conclusion of 2009, certain hardware (as shown above) and some software had been developed, however the system was nowhere near ready to fly. I have been tasked with pulling everything together over this summer. More posts to follow with details of progress from the beginning of summer until now.
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