This past week was quite productive. I spent the week building the electronics of the frame and getting the motors tested. I started by writing some code to control the ESCs via Arduino PWM and then created a small test setup to verify the motor speed could be varied. Then, I got our transmitter to transmit to the arduino through a receiver, and while our drone is autonomous, this setup will be used to test our PID manually. Finally, me and Bhavik soldered the ESCs to the power distribution board built into teh frame and tested all four motors together. The entire setup works and we now have a drone with motors that spin.
This upcoming week, I will spend time actually tuning the PID and merging in the kalman filter state estimation. The goal is to tune the PIDs for roll and pitch to teh point where we can have stable hover flight, with throttle controlled by the transmitter. I think this will be an ambitious goal, but we should be able to accomplish it.
After the intense progress of this week, I believe I am on track.