We received some great feedback from the PAB and were able to update our PDD without too much trouble. There was a bit of a struggle with defining system-level requirements, especially how to verify them; we ended up discussing one of them -- a sub-vehicle endurance requirement -- for about an hour without much consensus between group members. Everything came together smoothly, though, well before the PDD deadline. It's real clear now that it's difficult to write good requirements. We're lucky to have Leah, our systems engineer -- she's seen and written requirements before. Travis, our PM, is also proving to be well-organized and ready to lead this team. There wasn't a single person on the team that didn't have something useful or important to say every day we had a meeting.

Now it's time for the CDD. With all of the team members now in well-defined roles, we can focus our attention on the major subsystems of the MADS design. Although getting the CDD done within two weeks will be a challenge, we feel that the goals in our PDD should guide us towards the answers. We are all happy to be delving into trade studies of design solutions now, because even just two weeks of defining goals and requirements can get a little overbearing.

One of the most encouraging things to occur this week was that Jeff found a 200-page doctoral thesis of an engineer affiliated with the Air Force that contained a nearly-complete flight performance analysis of our primary vehicle, the SIG Rascal 110. A major challenge for the MADS project was to characterize this vehicle because very little is known about it -- RC plane designers usually don't even have this information on their own planes, and if they do, they don't release it to the public. Now we have information that may save some time and allow us to focus on the deployment mechanism and sub-vehicle design.

As a final note: Michael's revision control software for MADS documents, Vault, is invaluable!

Posted by Matt Lenda

After the first few weeks of senior design, the Miniature Aircraft Deployment System (MADS) project is off to a solid start! During our meetings, it was agreed that the most important thing is to stay organized. In an effort to start off organized, Michael Gordon and myself set up our own personal server using industry-standard version control software. The folks over at Source Gear (http://www.sourcegear.com/vault/) donated licenses for their version control software, Vault. Once this was set-up, the issues with document sharing, tracking changes, merging changes, viewing history, who-changed-what, formatting and anything that deals with multiple versions from multiple people are greatly reduced.

Since we have our very-own server, we decided to host our own web site. Both Kristina Wang and myself worked on getting this up over the past week. The site is nearly complete and can be seen at http://www.cu-mads.com.

Aside from organizational and server work, we met with our customer (Professor Frew) multiple times. This let us get a clear picture of what he wants and how we can provide him with a workable product as well as meeting the requirements of the senior design course. The team wrote a draft of the PDD. Mainly, it came down to a discussion and clarification of the project and system level requirements. This process was easier than imagined thanks to our Systems Engineer (Leah Crumbaker) having already written requirements in industry for her different internships. During this process, the entire project seemed to make more sense in all of our minds.

All that is left is to see what the PAB thought of our PDD and revise, revise, revise!

Posted by Jeff Mullen