Monthly Archives: April 2012

Today the Expo poster was my only focus. We have to setup the poster between 3 and 5pm today, and we haven’t finished the design, let alone print it out. We had a great start on the poster but we ended up scrapping 3 separate layouts because of the variety of information we put on the poster. We had sensor information, color distance formulas, as well servo communications and the xenomai real-time framework all present on our poster.

Layout problems aside, I was very pleased with how our poster turned out.

You can see it here: ACAS Expo poster

After attaching the rotor guards with hot glue and Styrofoam, I came to the conclusion that they would move around too much during flight and that we needed a better way to hold them steady. Additionally, we have no way to mount the BeagleBoard directly to the quadcopter platform. I talked with Nick Schmidt about this and we came up with a plan to put threaded rod vertically to hold two acrylic plates in place and provide a good mounting point for all of our extra hardware. The rods will go through the rotor guards and hold them firmly in place and do not them move laterally at all.

I spent this lab helping Nick cut and sand metal to provide a secure mount for the acrylic plates and threaded rod we are putting on the platform. From the sound of it, I will not get the completed assembly back for a few days while Nick finishing assembly of the new supports.