First Engineering Meeting

Today, we met with Manuel Coutinho and Filipa Santos to discuss ideas with professionals in the field. They have voluntered to help us in this journey whenever we need it. This guidance, even if distant, will help us understand what is trully possible within our limitations.

Introductions

We introduced our project and the work we had done. Our ideas for 3D scanning, real-time image streaming and quad-copter flight were well recieved. They immedeatly understood it's utility in practise, from forest fires to natural disasters and search and rescue operations.

They believed that, while our idea was interesting and worth it from a scientific point of view, we had a lot of technical challanges to overcome, primarly to do with flight, navigation and communication.

The Engineering

We discussed a lot of ways to implement our ideas. From communication protocols, antennas, navigation and flight, we went through a lot of topics in the 2 hours we were together.

Communication

We had a lot of ideas, but the one that stuck as the best was a dual stream system, where one would rely on a very directional antenna for high speed communication and another would be on an almost omnidirectional antenna to maintain consistent communication, even at slower speeds.

With a system like this, we can place our navigation communication in a slower, more reliable, network and the scientific data on a high speed stream through directional atennas. This gives us constant location data and navigation for the cansat, allowing us to line up the antenna more precisely and keeping a way of controlling it.

Flight and Navigation

We stuck with the quad-copter flight idea, as we already had some basic plans for design, we mostly discussed the reliability and software. They had doubts about the battery capacity needed for a system like this, but those had already been studied and properly addressed by us.

For navigation, we decided to use the tried and tested GPS + Compass system. This gives us the most reliability, even tho it limits us to Earth. We're aiming for a realistic and more pratical project, so this wasn't an issue for us. Even then, if the limited space allows it, we're interested in a interial navigation system as a backup.

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