Dear reader,
I talked to brilliant staff member Adi Nelson about what his senior design project team has done since we last talked.
Alex Reineke
All right, so what's happened? Start from the thermal camera.
Adi Nelson
So for the thermal camera, quick PSA: if you're using socket components, make sure your pins are actually making contact. We couldn’t communicate over I2C or SPI because the pins were just slightly too far apart. We ended up bending them a bit and applying more pressure to get output. After that, we tested range in the Marcus basement hallway and could see someone raise their arms from about 50–55 feet away, which was pretty good.
AR
That's pretty cool. I'm gonna back up. How did you discover that the pins weren't meshing with your thermal camera?
AN
Honestly, after a lot of frustration, one teammate just pushed down on it to see what would happen… and it started working. We hadn’t even considered bad pin contact since it looked fine in the MOLEX socket. So yeah, kind of a happy accident.
AR
Oh, wow. So, it was a happy accident.
AN
Yeah… from there I shifted to the flight controller. We had to wire things so we could send all four motor signals to the ESC using a protocol it understands. Most ESCs default to digital protocols, so since we're using a Teensy, we can code it in Arduino. We switched from a slower protocol, OneShot, to DShot… got that working, assembled the drone, and started initial flight tests. At first it would only lift on one side… later we got it fully off the ground with 10-inch props, but it crashed a lot. We think the IMU placement is causing stabilization issues, and the flight controller probably isn’t calibrated for a drone this large since the original project was meant for smaller builds.
AR
So you're gonna have to adjust for the size. How are you gonna approach that?
AN
That’s what I’m working on this week. The drone’s about 1.6 kilograms with an 8000 mAh battery—around 117 watt-hours—so it’s heavy. You’d expect long flight time, but getting something that heavy stable is tough. Luckily we’ve got larger props and a bigger frame… so now it’s just tuning and calibration.
AR
That's really cool. Thank you so much for your time!
