This week was mostly spent on building the actual drone and connecting all the electronic components. We began the week by putting the entire drone frame together. Once we had the basic drone frame together, we had to connect all the ESCs to the motors. Once this step was complete, I worked with Ankit to solder all the wires to the power joints. This involved soldering the wires, running a continuity test, and finally doing a final test with the actual power on. After soldering and performing a continuity test on all the wires, we were able to verify that the wires were placed in the correct spots and that there was no short circuiting. Then we plugged in the battery could see the motors were powered. This signifies that we can properly power the drone and have all motors working.
We then began to run basic tests on the ESCs by plugging in the motors to the ESCs and connecting the ESCs to an arduino. We also had a drone receiver connected to the arduino. We programmed the arduino such that it would take the input of the drone controller and equally power the motors. Ex, if we are at full throttle, all the motors would be spinning at its fastest rate. We ran the program and confirmed that the drone motors were correctly responding to the inputs. The next step would be to test the pid control code by hanging the drone and checking if it can be stable. If not, we will need to fine tune the PID control system. This part of the project is at the highest risk right now since the rest of the project relies on this aspect working. If the drone is able to be controlled in a stable manner, the path planning should hypothetically be simple.
In regards to the computer vision aspect of the project, we were delayed due to the switch we made to the Rasberry Pi 5. The parts arrived at the end of the week and we are currently working on setting up the pi. This process hopefully shouldn’t take too long. I will be prioritizing this step next week and getting the computer vision algorithms up and running on the pi.
