This week was mostly spent planning and ordering the remaining components for the project (GPS, planning power distribution, and Rpi attachment). I also cleaned up the code from the demo and prepared it for the final demo. I have also spent some time making sure that the radio communication can work bi-directionally. Moving on to the next parts of testing, we want to be able to send signals from the base station to the drone, hence we need to make sure this step works. Next week we will continue to integrate our system and test our drone to start flying.
Additonally, a majority of the time was spent creating the final presentation slides. I created a full outline of the presentation. I will continue to work on the slides by rerunning some demo scripts to capture more media for the presentation. Since I will be the one presenting this time, I have also begun to practice and get the required information.
Throughout this project, there were a lot of new tools and knowledge I had to learn in order to accomplish my tasks. Working a lot of various different hardware systems, I had to learn a lot about efficient methods to communicate between systems, the various communication protocols, and how to interface with third-party tools. I also had to learn a lot about controls (PID specifically). Some learning strategies were watching tutorials on related topics, looking at other project documentation, or talking with friends who were knowledgeable about the specific topic. I also learned a lot by trial and error. For example, using the knowledge I gained by reading documents and watching videos, I was able to implement basic functionality, learn from the mistakes made there, and retry. This has helped me take the theoretical knowledge and apply it in a fast manner.