Following last week's VERY successful flight tests, the MADS team took it up a couple notches this week to prepare for the deployment flight tests coming up. Here's an update for each team:

Electrical:
-We finalized the design of the DM control board this week and ordered them from Advanced Circuits. They are to be delivered in a week, at which point we will pull some extra hours and populate them. Test test test!

Software:
-The story of the software development has been, "Two steps forward, one step back." We have developed a custom telemetry stream for the DM CUPIC, connected the DM potentiometer signal lines to the DM CUPIC and telemetered the ADC conversion data, and developed new commands. ALL telemetry and commanding tests have been successful! Control of the DMs through the CUPIC has been verified.
-It was discovered that the CUPIC XBee radio or the MATLAB GUI (we can't tell which) fails to acknowledge the first command after firing up the GUI. Bill Pisano has known of this issue and has not debugged it. We have decided to implement a "no-op" command to verify forward command link.
-We discovered that our CUPIC development/programming board has a faulty chip; SUAV allowed us to borrow theirs (thanks, guys!). A replacement chip is on the way.
-We're carrying a lot of instrumentation in our PVs on subsequent flights (a custom IMU, an Eagletree datalogger, etc.), and we will be writing custom code on the DM CUPIC to take in and telemeter Flow Meter data from our gas engine.
-We are currently writing the final code for the deployment sequence for our SVs. Static drop tests and SV waypoint/loiter tests are up and coming!

Mechanical:
-We have two PVs outfitted with fuselage reinforcements and one set of deployment system bars. It was discovered that the bars were not drilled properly, resulting in an undesired angular displacement. These are to be remade!
-The DM mounting hardware has been designed. A "cheap" version has been implemented, but a nicer-looking version will be made this week.
-We are planning on mounting several things to the outside of the PVs: Switches for the DM manual override system; switches for the CU dataloggers; and a switch to turn on the DM CUPIC. This allows us access to the CDH subsystem in the PV fuselage without having to (painstakingly) remove the wings.
-New CG and CP calculations are on the way. We were concerned about static margin during last week's flight tests.

All in all, we're making quite a bit of progress. A full system flight test -- deployment and all -- is scheduled in the next few weeks. All subsystems have tests scheduled just prior to the flight test to verify their functionality.

Posted by Matt Lenda

After a weekend of disappointing weather and delayed flights, the MADS team learned from our mistakes and progressed forward through the week. Our first task was to complete our IR1 presentation, which we finished in the knick of time. All team members were pleased with the PAB's response. Given that we had already prepared to fly the system the previous weekend, Matt and Michael decided to push ahead and fly our sub-vehicles with the CUPIC a week early. After a frustrating bug with the servo command output, a comparator circuit was designed, built, and successfully tested to make our Superfly's servos compatible with the CUPIC. Many long nights ensued where we prepared our secondary SIG and rebuilt our sub-vehicles to ensure that our chances for success on Saturday were as high as possible. In short, all of our effort paid off. Not only was the MADS team successful in creating a stable, controllable mothership that flies with any symmetric sub-vehicle configuration, but we successfully demonstrated the capability of the CUPIC to maintain a loiter pattern. Sadly, the sub-vehicle could not get to full throttle (even after turning the gain up several times) making it difficult to maintain altitude when traveling into the wind. As for the next few weeks, the MADS team plans to take advantage of being ahead of schedule and prepare for actual deployment testing. This will prove to be a real test of our endurance, but thankfully, we're all still smiling. Please check out photos and videos posted of our flight from this past weekend.

Posted by Michael Gordon

MADS has been super-busy preparing to fly the whole system on Sunday, Feb 1.

Monday - Saturday
After working several hours, the team had a 100% flyable, 800% super-awesome looking machine at the end of saturday night.

Sunday
With a 6:30am meeting call, the team met at school to load up the convoy with all the equipment necessary for flight. Jeff/Kristina/Matt/Jason stopped by starbucks where Jeff ordered a quad-shot americano and the rest got big jugs of coffee for the crew. The team arrived at the Arvada Associated Modellers Airfield at 7:30am where they were greeted with smiles from Frank.

The team began to assemble the blue Rascal 110, but on assembly of the wing struts, a blind nut was stripped, so the red wings were put on the blue body.

Around 9am, the first flight of the Rascal took place!

Peter flew the plane beautifully, had a brilliant landing, and there were no issues.

After landing, Peter and Chris tuned the control throws and the engine. We were about to do a second flight of the sig, but during the pre-flight inspections, the tail of the plane was discovered to be broken.

After a quick field-repair among the experts in RC planes, the Rascal was good to go for another flight! However, during the pre-flight, the winds started to gust to 30mph and flying was called off for the day.

Other than flying the Rascal, Frank flew one of the constructed superfly's--and it worked!

After an early-morning, and a long weekend of work, MADS is looking forward to presenting IR #1 on Tuesday and flying the full system next weekend!

All photos can be found under Photos > First Flight Test
Posted by Jeff Mullen