Miscellania

Present: Ashley, Nela, Murtaza, Yasha, Lucas, Lewis, Tom

Apologies: Mary.

Announcements

The following announcements were made:

• an update on funding - progress is being made, primarily thanks to Ashley. Sponsorship from corporate groups is promising.

• Carlos has left the team due to other commitments, with apologies.

Discussed

Power Management

From Lucas:

• reverse polarity protection for the battery on the board should be easy to implement

• power buffering to protect the MCU is high priority, even at the cost of extra mass or complexity

• buzzer power and control may be a challenge.

Questions:

• Yasha: can we isolate the servos too? Faulty servo believed to have fried boards last year

• Yasha: can we play chiptunes on the buzzer?

Structural Concept

From Lewis:

• a structural concept was presented - four 6mm aluminium rods screwed into plates at either end

• mass of this should be approx 90g at full 350mm length

Questions:

• Tom: could this design be modularised to allow easy access to electronics et cetera?

  • Ashley: how modular can electronics be made?

  • Yasha: could headphone jacks or other standardised ports be used?

  • Nela: could we get custom cables made?

• Yasha: Could we use threaded rod and nuts rather than screws?

FSM Block Diagram

From Nela:

• a breakdown of what a finite state machine is and how it works

• a discussion of the states we will likely use in our codebase

Questions:

• Yasha: discussion of states required by spec

Autogyro

From Tom:

• autogyro will only have two blades

• a DC motor connected to the shaft could be used to calculate rotation speed

• props can be purchased or made

Questions:

• Tom: would the DC motor generate back EMF?

• Nela: speccing an encoder for the autogyro will require knowing approximate rotation rate; can we calculate that?

• Yasha: props could be forged carbon-fibre or layups on printed core?

• Ashley: could props be resin-cast?

Deployable Gearbox

From Tom:

• could drive all deployables with two servos and a gearbox

Questions:

• Yasha: are you out of your f*!£ing mind?

Further Business

Questions for Ivan

• what should the autogyro rotation rate be measured relative to?

• can we use carbon-fibre on the outside of the container? or is it 3D printed only?

Questions for Szy and Michael

• how did we control buzzer last year?

• do we need multiple PCB designs/software architectures for PDR?

Shopping List

• dev board

• magnetometer (Nela to spec)

• DC motor

• encoders (Nela to spec)