Week 7

Finally got the Tera ranger to work with the avoidance system and able to produce the signal similar to the pixhawk signal. The drone itself works fine without any functions customized. implementing the system together wasn't successful.

Without the pixhawk, just the arduino connected to the ESC to control the motor was bad. The motors behave weirdly and sometimes doesn't move at all. All this happens and we try to find out why and how to solve it but we came to a dead end. We concluded that the Arduino signals was too noisy and the ESC cannot work in that signal. The Arduino signal do have voltage spikes in the their signal and that may have caused the undesired behavior. With adding delay into the arduino, every delay added into the code itself will not only slow down only that certain part of the code itself but the entire code. We found out that this is the reason the arduino is too slow or results it in hanging.

We printed the parachute release system and tested the solenoid with the power generator. The solenoid did move and opened the cover of the container when a 12V, 1.3A was applied. We started to build a circuit for the solenoid. The circuit consists of a mercury switch a transistor as well as a capacitor and resistor. Below consists of the circuit.

We printed the crank and slider mechanism for the scissors and the trimming system works when power is supplied to the DC geared motor. As the voltage increases, the motor speed increases, and the scissors moves faster. We measured the pulse widths of the Futaba receiver channel 5 when the Futaba transmitter switch A is being toggled. The pulse widths when the switch is at down and up positions are 2.1 ms and 1 ms respectively. The period is 13.6 ms. We tried the analogRead function to detect the pulse width of channel 5 of Futaba receiver but we got random numbers. We then tried the Arduino pulseIn function and the trimming system managed to be toggled. We decided before trying it on the bluetooth module first as it is easily controllable with any smartphones out there. However, the range of the bluetooth is 10m which is way too short. Below is a video of how our bluetooth module worked with a smartphone.