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Town Hall Notes

This page is designed to contain all the notes/updates/action items from our regular team-wide townhall meetings.

Town hall slides are stored in our Google Drive folder.

November 16, 2023

Click here for the slides that accompany these notes.

Competition Aircraft Design

We decided on fixed wing with the capability to add VTOL.

Airframe

  • Progress: Learning onshape, finished manufacturing wings, fuselage, tail

  • Made 10 project groups for each task

    ⁃ Thomas will post this in leads channel for cross team collaboration.

Embedded

  • started power board designs

  • We are researching new battery types

    • we want to switch because there is a mess of wires in the front
    • Samir: LiPo is more energy dense than Li-Ion?

  • Jeremy has been working on esp32 for guided payload

    • how will we get a rocket ac connection to the guided payload?
      • We may need an omnidirectional antenna

Embedded end of quarter goals

  • Power Board:

    • Complete PCB initial design, order over Winter Break

  • TUAS Proprietary Battery (name pending):

    • Battery cell model decided, fabrication plan developed

  • Signals Board:

    • Have signals board recreated, members understand code, and on our way to getting current measurements

  • Antenna Tracker:

    • Ethernet connection replaced with WiFi and tested during test flight

  • Guided Payload:

    • Servo control logic programmed and able to be controlled remotely

Software

  • Losing to cmake
    • remaining difficulties getting the new build system to work
  • OBCpp dubins curve done
  • Localization is worked on
  • Camera. Solid testing setup. Images looking reliably good.
    • Next step: test on moving plane. More testing.

Business

  • Mid quarter update post for blog and LinkedIn
  • Planning Tuas Olympics.
  • Working on winter fundraisers

Prospective

  • Deadlines for rest of quarter is the same.
    • Mock test flight tomorrow 11/17 5:30pm
    • Test flight Saturday

Retrospective

  • we are on track for all the goals we set out
    • Onboarding plane will be done before Thanksgiving

Action Items

  • Thomas will post airframe team assignments in leads channel for cross team collaboration.
  • Samir: LiPo is more energy dense than Li-Ion?
  • how will we get a rocket ac connection to the guided payload?

November 2, 2023

Click here for the slides that accompany these notes.

Airframe

  • test flight moved week 6 -> 7 Airframe
  • onboarding: getting familiar with bonding procedures and surface prep, solidworks
  • design optimization: learning MATLAB, optimization, Ansys Pilot
  • successful Black Mtn flights with Valiant
  • 4 safety pilots have gotten practice
  • potential VTOL flight next weekend

Competition Aircraft Design

  • Important discussion between VTOL or fixed-wing design
  • VTOL
    • David made a test small VTOL to learn Ardupilot VTOL features and get more info for our ultimate decision
    • Pros
      • less stressful takeoffs at Black Mtn
      • Higher payload capacity/more flight time
        • can make the plane wings smaller as they only need to support hover and not takeoff
      • increase time over target for test flights (hover)
    • Cons
      • Complex manufacturing
      • Complex operation
      • Cost - at max $1000 more for 4 motors
      • development time longer
    • Embedded does not need to change much other than supporting the extra power draw
    • Software should not need to change much (still using Arduplane) and Ardupilot has good q_assist failsafe parameters
    • Airdrop mechanism should not be affected by this decision
    • Effect on batteries is unknown; most time spent in cruising will still use same amount of energy
    • Discussion:
      • No major complaints from software and embedded leads
      • worst case fallback to onboarding plane
      • we can incrementally test VTOL hover to get reassurance this is working
      • stiffness is a concern, but toothless was very rigid
      • manufacturing is fundamentally the same. Difference is adding tail booms and motor mounting and unknown unknowns
    • Decision: slight preference among members for VTOL Guided payload
  • Thinking of using onshape
  • need collaboration among airframe and embedded

Embedded

  • Workshops done for: arduino, soldering, PCB design, mavlink
  • working on signals board onboarding project for onboarding plane
  • power board design is made
  • Antenna tracker: Jeremy working on wifi

Software

  • GCS: no progress
  • Onboarding: 6 new members on OBC
  • OBCpp
    • camera connection interface
    • mavlink connection interface
    • porting RRT* path planning algorithm
    • Heavy work in The Great CMake War to get all our dependencies building correctly on everyone's PC
  • Localization
    • working on generating more test cases in Blender
    • after testing, have discovered out current localization algorithm does not work. Needs work.
  • Saliency (cropping targets from camera images)
    • made new metrics to find how well the model is doing to discern between targets and mannequin
  • LUCID camera
    • investigating High Dynamic Range
    • weighing whether to shift to another camera before next town hall

Business

  • Successful :pumpkin: carving event!
  • future: tapex social, study jam

Upcoming deadlines:

  • VTOL decision by leads this Monday
  • Week 6-8
  • Test flights with Duckasaurus
  • Next town hall week 7 Thursday, November 16 @6:15 pm
  • Week 9
  • Onboarding aircraft inaugural flight
  • Deadline for software to bring finished code to test
  • Software to make devision on new camera
  • Week 10
  • plane design done

October 19, 2023

Click here for the slides that accompany these notes.

  • Not much of note. All the time was spent on start-of-year cleanup and doing onboarding.

Prospective for the rest of this quarter 

Week 4 New plane design development starts
        New members and returners welcome
Week 5-6 Test flights with Duckasaurus 
    Next town hall week 5 Thursday, November 2 6:15 pm
Week 9  Onboarding plane
    Deadline for software to bring finished code to test

Retrospective from the notes of last year's town hall

✅ MAKE SURE TO NOT MISS LIBRARY WALK TABLING DEADLINE

✅ GET INVOLVED AD

✅ ENGINEERS ON THE GREEN

✅ make plan for 2-3 lab cleanup weekends over summer, ready ourselves to move things to storage and make the lab clean for new members

✅ week0 move stuff to storage room

✅timer on slide presentations for town hall (agreed not to do)

❌maintained throughout the year with rotating cleaning schedule

❌software reserve meeting rooms

❌indoctrinate new members into lab procedures

❌2 slides at beginning of town hall slideshows

❌prospective: deadlines coming up

❌retrospectives: how we met the deadlines at previous prospective

We also met the OKRs from last year for over the summer. The website got a marketing overhaul.

June 6, 2023

Click here for the slides that accompany these notes.

Note 1: These notes are focused on changes for the upcoming year. Note 2: Here is the link for the procedure document we drafted a couple of weeks ago. It is also now posted in the important links section on the front page of the wiki.

General

  • MAKE SURE TO NOT MISS LIBRARY WALK TABLING DEADLINE
    • fall definitely
    • winter maybe?
  • GET INVOLVED AD
  • ENGINEERS ON THE GREEN
  • make plan for 2-3 lab cleanup weekends over summer, ready ourselves to move things to storage and make the lab clean for new members
    • week0 move stuff to storage room
    • maintained throughout the year with rotating cleaning schedule
  • software reserve meeting rooms
  • indoctrinate new members into lab procedures
  • 2 slides at beginning of town hall slideshows
    • prospective: deadlines coming up
    • retrospectives: how we met the deadlines at previous prospective
  • timer on slide presentations for town hall

Embedded

  • signals board
    • test current of the plane’s power system between motor -> esc -> batteries
  • onboarding projects
    • recreate signals board with thermaster
    • basically build a mock plane
      • motor, esc, receiver, 4 servos

Airframe

  • onboarding projects
    • mini project plane
    • how many depends on how many members come up
      • maximum 2 planes
      • possibly 5 per plane if like 10 people showed up
    • 5 weeks of onboarding and also a series of workshops
      • solidworks and manufacturing, AFL/NVision fieldtrip. Maybe Ansys
    • have returning members come later to early meetings so new members can talk with them

Software

  • camera
    • iterate on camera settings in Warren Mall / High on Jacobs or a parking structure
      • try to get it where the environment is well lit but the targets are also visible
    • attach metadata to images to describe flight conditions when the image was taken (Altitude, Attitude, Airspeed, GPS)
  • onboarding projects
    • level 0-2 projects on the wiki
      • 0 basic programming
      • 1 CSE 11 PA
      • 2 specific to project team
  • curriculum
    • series of workshops
    • scheduling details tbd
    • want to suck people in with club culture, don’t worry people too much about contributing

Business

  • we want more integration with business leads, and have business leads come to leads meetings

May 22, 2023

Click here for the slides that accompany these notes.

General Updates

  • over summer will probably start getting things ready to move to storage week 0 of fall quarter
  • hoping to be back from the test flight this saturday the 27th by noon/lunchtime
  • want to test duck week 8 weekend
    • really want to test the camera
  • want to fly toothless week 9 weekend
    • first day tune
    • second day put in stuff
      • more likely airdrop than camera because we would have already tested it on the duckasaurus

Progress Reports

  • manufacturing:
    • on schedule for repairs for toothless
      • fixing wings and hinges
      • new landing gear adaptor in the process of creation
    • Duckasaurus waiting on microballoons so that we can mount the camera in the plane for this weekend’s test flight
  • camera gimbal:
    • not very precise right now, so changing it to brushless motors, but this is currently a research task
  • parachute:
    • minor testing
    • newly-dimensioned cruciform parachute
      • slowed the bottle down by more even though it is now smaller
    • also tried a parafoil kite
      • crashed 🙁
    • cruciform chute seems more promising
    • chute casing is still too weak, we we want to make it not do that
    • will want to test with the actual mechanism soon
      • embedded - airframe colab 👀
  • design optimizations:
    • onboarding project in MatLab & optimization methods
    • lots of learning 🙂
    • will have more visuals soon hopefully
  • camera integration:
    • been having trouble with artifacts in camera images
    • been trying to solve this, been contacting support staff from Lucid
    • today (May 23) finally seems to have been solved by fixing some ethernet/networking settings on the jetson
  • dependency migration from pipenv to poetry
    • poetry modern and fast
    • pipenv sad and slow
  • wiki
    • please try out README on the wiki and set it up locally
    • can either add content by one of two ways:
      • send markdown file to software lead
      • follow tutorial on wiki README on github
    • if you are not added to our Github please send a message to a lead to get added
  • segmentation
    • seemingly good model
    • hoping to test on images from this weekend's test flight
  • electronics box
    • hopefully fit all electronics in one module in the plane
    • no taping stuff to the side of the plane 🙂
  • embedded airdrop
    • more focusing on the wiki
      • onboarding for next year
    • less focusing on airdrop algorithm because don’t know when we would be able to actually test this
  • embedded signals board
    • also focusing on the wiki
    • planning for bigger picture stuff in the fall
    • eventually we want to expand the signals board to also switch to another communication protocol to be more flexible on the ports available on the pixhawk
    • also want to research other data that we might want to have
      • current?
      • some of these could potentially aid in autonomous takeoff
    • thermosters for more electronics like the Jetson?
    • general fuselage temp?
  • tapex

May 8, 2023

Debrief/post-mortem meeting after failing to complete the Flight Readiness Review video by the deadline and being disqualified from the 2023 competition.

Goals for the rest of the year

  • Retrofit Duckasaurus to get the camera put inside for testing by week 7
  • Fix toothless for airdrop testing to test on week 9
  • Software meeting to talk with embedded about how to improve GCS, plane wiring and poweboard
  • Incorporate standup/town hall meetings for the rest of the quarter
  • By this upcoming Friday, the leads will put together a document that outlines all the new procedures

Ideas for future

  • Keep track and organize of all important pieces of hardware and buy more to have backups
  • Eliminate segregation of manufacturing and design teams
    • More team wide design decisions for airframe
  • Have new plane designed over summer
  • Onboarding planes for airframe
    • accelerate design of competition plane
    • more inclusive of members
  • Notion - wiki replacement?
    • Useful since it's less friction for people to add to it
  • Google form to ask people how much time they want to put in, if they want to be in the thick of it or not
  • Newsletter in slack or wiki with logs and updates
  • Test flight checklist for each subteam
  • Biweekly town hall where people present progress and have discussion
    • Could also make a PR to the wiki with updates every town hall
  • Could have living document to log progress and what are the important things that need to be done