Week 11

We finished our first presentation regarding CD ( conceive and design ). We realized that our current method of controlling the drone when it detects a wall is incorrect and would not work. Our method was to directly override the ESC signals sent to the motor using the arduino, however this would not work as once the drone detects a wall, motors at the back of drone will decrease in speed, this will cause the drone to immediately crash. The correct method was to decode the pitch channel of the receiver and customizing our own controls. Also, the trimming device was way too hard to execute as there will be a huge momentum shift when the DC motor is activated and the drone will be very unstable due to the uneven weight distribution. The pilot of the drone also has to have years of flying experience for the drone to be able to execute the trimming. Thus we had to look into ways to improve the mechanism. We also had to find a suitable camera for our drone as we want to implement a live feed video on our drone so that the user can monitor the plants on the vertical wall. We decided to have a team meeting and decide how should we continue with doing the project. We've decided that we need a whole new concept in the trimming device which does not cause too much of a momentum swing in the drone. We will also need to find out how to use the pitch channel of the receiver as we learnt from our previous failures.