Mugin Updates

Here is the latest on the Mugin and a few other updates. First of all, I got the fancy fuel-injected motor mounted to the bench, ran it, and then got it mounted on the plane. That is one big step toward a maiden. Also, it is insanely powerful, as compared to the Saito FG-57, so this plane will have much better climb performance, payload capacity, and ability to fly at high altitude.

Servos are all in and wired up. I still need to make the wiring harness for the fuselage but I'm taking it slow until I get all the electronics mounted in their final locations. And, speaking of, I just finished the custom vibration-damped avionics stack. Hopefully it does its job and doesn't end up amplifying vibration...

All the parts are in except for the alternator and radio amplifiers. Hopfully those will be in soon so we have everything we need. In the meantime, I'm going to finish up getting the electronics we have mounted and wired in. Also, I got around to powering up our Micasense RedEdge today. It is an impressive little camera and it took me no time to get it triggering off the Pixhawk. It is really configurable, which is nice. It means that on the Drak we can simply pull out the QX-1, unplug the trigger from the servo wire, plug the RedEdge into said servo wire, and we're ready to roll.

The other major thing I'm working on is an accuracy comparison of DroneDeploy, Photoscan, and Pix4D. I'm using the campus imagery from 2 years ago, which isn't the best dataset, but it is at least a real-world example. I have a CAD file for the entire campus so I'll be measuring points in it and comparing to their position in the imagery and elevation in the DEM.

There's bound to be some kind of mischief I can get into having all this information...

Well, that's it for now, I'll update in a week or so, hopefully with a nearly-ready-to-fly plane.