Propulsion team has designed a cable guard that prevents wires from getting caught in the tilt rotor’s gears. They had 3D printed the joint and installed it on the tilt rotor prototype.

Mechanical Design has showed their progress the new fuselage design and has completed one prototype of the electronics housing (seen in the picture above). A second, better iteration of the housing is currently in the works. The team is working on an FEA for the drop test of the plane’s frame and so far they’ve had some issues with the computer failing in the middle of a calculation.

Fabrication has attached the first leading edge of balsa wood to the wing assembly. They have prepped the control surfaces for the next step: composite lay ups. The team is finishing up on manufacturing the rods and joints for the plane’s frame.

Ground Station has made steady progress with their Widget functions. The GraphWidget can now track several data streams. The team has implemented two new functions, the TimerWidget and StatusWidget. Also, the GUI can now save flightpaths as files, so now Ground Station has to work on getting the program to load those files. The team has started working on the new network packet library and protocol rules. Lastly, Ground Station has done some housekeeping with their GitHub work, including cleaning up and resolving conflicts in their project code.

Avionics has finalized the final modular power and data wiring for the tilt rotor frame. They are also testing their new design of directly integrating the LIDAR with the Pixhawk 5 with the help of a battery eliminator circuity (BEC), which powers these components. Avionics is still looking through the ArduPilot code from last week and are also working with Mechanical Design to redesign the schematics for the electronics housing.

The plane will now have all its components for the frame and electronics housing by the end of this quarter.