UAV Forge has been a project that caters to many engineering departments, including MAE, EECS, and CompSci. The issue is, anyone in the EECS or CompSci, couldn’t receive design credit because there was no actual class in their discipline; there was MAE 195 but that was considered independent study. Ariel, the incoming Project Lead, contacted Professor Pai Chou, the administrator in charge of EECS design credit classes. She was able to create the EECS classes under Professor Haithem Taha, the advisor for UAV Forge. Now for the 2017-2018, all of the team members will have chance to earn the design credit that they deserve for this project.

The Propulsion team’s Rotormast model kit as arrived and they are now assembling the kit. This kit is meant to be the next step for UAV Forge; Cheng hopes that the new Project Leads will use the Rotormast as a base for the newer and improved tilt-rotor.

The Mechanical Design team has finished most of their FEA simulation. They will be working with Fabrication to build he frame and other structures needed for the plane.

Fabrication has been collaborating with Avionics to move the on-board electronics from the quadcopter prototype to the electronic housings. They have begun gluing the rods and joints of the frame together. Lastly, Fabrication worked on attaching foam pieces onto the trailing edge of the wings.

Ground Station has finished decoupling the network code from the main program but removing the “dummy” filler code somehow broke the database. To transition the program into using MAVLink code, the team used filler code for testing purposes. They will investigate how the errors occurred. Ground Station will continue performing network tests using different MAVLink packets. They were able to preserve the packets over transfer but haven’t been able to attach data payloads to the packets. Lastly, Ground Station is preparing the main program code for “storage” so that they can save their work and restart it when Fall quarter begins.

Avionics is assisting Fabrication on the tilt-rotor assembly, specifically the electronics housing. They are still setting up the Pixhawk 2 and GPS configuration. Then, from the past attempts, Avionics has found a potential lead for locating the LiDAR variable needed for data outputs. Avionics is also working on rewiring the tilt rotor servos using the 22 gauge wire that came in the mail. Lastly, the team is still designing the switching circuit.