Sixteen Days

We have 16 days until our HASP application is due and the team has been squeezing in meetings between finals, deadlines, and for one team member, a job at FedEx. We had a three hour Google Hangout in the middle of the night on Tuesday, a three hour engineering team meeting, scattered sub-group meetings and have an All-Hands meeting next week to put the final touches on the draft.

The Google Hangout produced a three page long task list for engineering team to solve before Saturday morning. One of the things that they tackled today was to ensure that everything fits inside a small Payload and weighs less than 2.5 kg.

Ryan made a model of the payload and we grabbed all of the items we hope to fly and tried to see if they would fit in what is basically the size of a shoebox.




The next task was to discuss if we can ensure that the tUR spine can fly in its current form
or provide a design for a streamlined spine/Arduino (i.e. eliminate the breadboard) as it can fly.
The Arduino needs to be able to:

• control unknown electrical elements (servos, valves, etc.)
• receive/send data 
• and within bitrate parameters
• measure temperature* (internal), temperature*/humidity*/pressure* (external), pressure* (internal), acceleration (internal), time*, as well as the SO2 sensors

STRETCH GOAL: The Arduino could also control a small ‘keychain’ camera.

The sulfur dioxide sensor for the Arduino proved to be a bit of a challenge. Mainly because we knew what we wanted but it was difficult to find enough information on the websites to tell if what we were looking at was a good fit. Dank and The Fixer did a lot of research and made a few phone calls to pick out a winner. One thing that we've learned from this project already is how to make friends with Customer Service.

I had to leave the meeting to go teach a class but things were well underway when I left. It sounds like they are meeting again this weekend and that research team is going to have a meeting. If we aren't accepted to HASP it won't be because of a lack of effort.

Here's a room with four students who have basically just met and one more stumbled in for introductions before I left. It's amazing to watch how quickly they can bond over this work and what a safe space this is for sharing ideas.