This week we prepared our design presentation and continued to order parts. Our design presentation consists of much of the introductory information from the proposal, with a few updates. For example, we updated the schedule to be more detailed because we had a better idea of our tasks. We created a block diagram based on the parts we ordered and our integration plan.
We researched and ordered more parts earlier this week including a 4-pack of motors, 16-pack of propellers, 4 ESC controllers, bullet connectors, and a 2-pack of parachutes. This makes up a bulk of materials, not including a housing unit to put them inside of. We received the Wi-Fi board and after some delay, we finally received the antenna we ordered last week. We ran some pretests on the antenna and board and determined the directional antenna was usable for direction finding. A problem we saw with the RSSI data we collected was considerable noise. We plan to use a filter to remove it, so we will research RSSI filter design in the coming week.
Because of the delay on the antenna and a few other parts we are still waiting on, we have adjusted the schedule. Our pretest phase will continue into the week of design presentations. We hope to verify some important metrics during this time, namely, drop speed with the parachute and thrust of the propellers.
An updated schedule and CAD model is attached.
