We had our Senior Project 1 Final Presentation today! We were first up at 9 am and discussed all of the components to our design! The Mechanical Engineering Faculty and Senior Class were all there to see what we’ve done this semester! There were even a bunch of underclassmen to see what they could do senior year! Overall it was very successful, it was nice to relax after our presentation and really have a chance to enjoy the other presentations!

Brandon placed an order to national balsa that we got already! Our first package!!!!

We placed our HUGE Tower Hobbies Order today! We even got a discount for how much we ordered!

Chris placed orders to Aircraft Spruce and Good Winds!

Alison placed an order for our GPS!! Its going to be delivered from Hong Kong so we wanted to get that in as early as possible!

For the wing Olivia is looking into adding cutouts to the airfoils to lighten the wing. She is also determining how many of the airfoils should be balsa or birch plywood, the birch will give the wing its strength while the balsa simply gives it the shape.

Chris is looking into 3D printing connecting blocks to attach the tail components in a lighter way than last years plane. He is designing them now and going to have prototypes printed soon to stress test.

Brandon is starting to make an integrated design with the Solidworks files of the designs so far.

Christine has determined to decrease the height of the landing gear a little more, this will decrease the weight of the landing gear. She is also planning to prototype the dropping mechanisms.

Alison is planning to order the RTK GPS as soon as possible, after double checking a few questions with the   manufacturer. She is also working on the quadcopter with Chris and Grant the underclassmen helping with the project! They determined the issues with the yaw and corrected them. Grant is now working on building a stand for the quadcopter!

Here is the integrated design so far with the fuselage, wing and tail!

We met with the Dean of Engineering to go over our budget and design! We went through our materials budget which was approved! YAY!! We have a budget for each component of the plane now: Wing, Tail, Fuselage, Landing Gear, Payloads and Dropping Mechanism, Telemetry, Engine, and Tools that we would need!

We are very excited to start ordering our different materials for each component!

We are now officially hired by the school! This means that we can drive down to Florida for competition as soon as we reserve the vans!

October 20th: We met with our pilot, Keith and discussed our preliminary designs with him! It was great to hear his insight and learn from him. We need to edit our designs slightly, but overall we are on the right track!

Officially registered

Began engine testing!

Different types of propellers to be tested

Meeting with our pilot next week:  TBD

We have a list of things to order after meeting with Joe to test out the Engine! We had to make a makeshift fuel pump because the one that the AeroDesign team usually uses broke last year at competition!

Alison is looking into different types of positioning systems for the telemetry to use and comparing the weights of them!

Christine plans on finishing her landing gear calculations over break so that she can move on to her design! She also plans to come in on Monday and work on prototyping payloads!

Olivia is working on determining the center of lift for her airfoil. She is also putting them into Solidworks now!

Chris wants to start modeling the tail! He also plans to ask Keith about the responsiveness of the last few planes.

This morning we all got up nice and early to meet with our machinist Joe! He gave us a monthly calendar with all the important dates over the next 2 semesters as a reference. He gave us information on the tools we will need to be using, the CNC and the Laser Cutter! He also gave us some advice on different aspects of senior project overall!