Pre-Meeting Notes

Questions

• Alignment on Fixed Wing 2025

  • Renamed pages in 2024-2025 Program Outline to align with ideas

• Will this plane be a similar design as our comp drone? Should we decide on a rough comp drone design before starting this project?

  • will not be icarus sized fuselage

• Design around sensors and electronics, create a full list of every electronic part and their mounting requirements first.

• Optimize for space, the fuselage has to be small and aerodynamic.

• Custom battery? Should we look into this for this platform?

• For reference hacked together diagram for future Pegasus can be found in Big Quad 2025

• Reference ideas for CAN system block diagram is shown in

Engineering Decisions

• Wingspan

• Weight

• Number of props

• Prop/motor locations

• Motor type

• Tail type (V-tail, elevator/rudder, inverted v-tail)

• Landing gear (wheels?)

• Manufacturing methods

• Simulations

In-Meeting Notes

• “small-ish fixed wing” is main fixed wing for mech prototyping

  • “big” and “small” fixed wing docs in were merged together

• Don’t mix EFS and mech testing

• Flight characteristics analysis

• Modular design

• One frame for mech, one for EFS. Validate EFS plane with Pixhawk first.

• Compare different fuselages/payloads in sim and in real life

• Make list of sensors and mounting requirements

  • <- for each device requirements should go as subpages to this

• Start with a plane motor that we have

  • AT4130

• Iterative design process needed to specify motors, props and power system?

• Research motor placement and number of motors, assign this task (smile)

• Use non-folding props at the beginning

• 5kg -Daniel

  • for reference, each is ~900g for comparison with Pegasus tho we could absolutely pick diff batteries … Can use the bunch we have

  • Daniel would prefer 6S if we can make it solve, but i guess out of scope here, will need to do motor selection first

    • makes all electronics cheaper as long as the wire weight is tolerable

    • keeps battery at around 1kg if we wanna use our existing packs

  • Use the skygauge packs

• 4 foot wingspan

• Do more research on tail type, dependent on motor location

• Interchangable tail types for testing

• Wheels for takeoff/landing

• Ribs for wings with plastic sheet cover

• Thermoforming wings?

• Aluminum ribs on waterjet

• Foam fuselage for EFS version, potentially switch for future revisions

• electronics stack

  • maybe 5.8ghz analog video (buy more analog transmitters)

  • Don’t un LTE because of weight and cost (use RFD900 or ELRS)

    • hopefully no RFD

  • 1x gps → place away from motor

    • if we do in the wings do 2x

    • will be UART

  • RM3100 external mag?

    • would be redunant to GPS

    • CAN for megnetometer

  • single connector to wings long term, early on maybe not

  • no opflow

  • downward facing rangefinder

  • pitot tube for airspeed

    • could go in wing or nose

Action Items

• Go through what motors we have in the bay as options for this vehicle, prop research -Smile

• Select puller, pusher, center, or side prop options as initial configuration -Mech

• Make a list of the components we want to run - Nathan

• Block diagram for electronics first draft - Daniel