What are you doing?

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Dragon029
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Re: What are you doing?

Post by Dragon029 »

Might as well throw it in here (IIRC, I deleted a fair bit of info off my 'farewell-for-now' thread):

For those who don't know, I'm an Officer Cadet (a commissioned training rank) of the Royal Australian Air Force, doing a paid degree at the Australian Defence Force Academy so that I can become an Aerospace Engineer Officer (Electronics).

Right now I'm just about to go into final exams for my first year of electrical engineering; overall I'm passing, but it can be a real mindf*** at times - elec eng is literally the hardest degree available here.

Although I don't get too much free time, I'm also part of 2 engineering extracurricular activity groups:

Formula Society of Automotive Engineers - we build what resembles a large go kart; in reality, it's a vehicle that will do 0 - 100kph in less than 4 seconds, can take corners at 1.6G's and also brake at something like 4G's. Our Facebook page.

ADFA UAV - I'm the 2IC of this group as Project Manager; we're building a 3m wingspan fixed wing UAV designed to be able to autonomously fly to a location, search the ground (using cameras) for a missing person, then, when we confirm that it's the missing person, drop a water bottle within 100m of their location.
We're only about 4 months old, and we've only recently received funding ($14,000), but we've received most of the electronics and the airframes are likely going to arrive in a month or two. Currently, we're also looking for sponsors - as part of that, we've got significant interest from an Air Vice Marshal (2 star rank) who is currently the head of the RAAF's Capability Development Group. With his name, we should be able to wrangle in a few sponsors, such as Northrop Grumman (they recently gave $10,000 to a highschool nearby for a highschool version of our competition), as well as maybe Thales, Raytheon, Qantas and maybe Boeing. Things are looking good.
The competition website.
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Eric
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Re: What are you doing?

Post by Eric »

Cool stuff Dragon029. Are you a member of IEEE as well? I'm doing the IEEEXtreme competition this Friday, and I'm also working on two projects with our local student chapter, building a Quadcopter as well as doing some Arduino labs. And today I was elected to be the webmaster for our chapter (not like it's any harder than YSFHQ).

Note that I am not an EE major myself, but I hang out with them quite a bit.
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Dragon029
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Re: What are you doing?

Post by Dragon029 »

Unfortunately not; I've actually put an application in twice, but never got a response for some reason.

As for the UAV; our system will be using a pair of Ardupilots (for redundancy) as well as a Pandaboard running Linux. We need to be able to operate and receive footage from 10-15km away, so we'll be using a pair of 5.8GHz 500mW (27dBi) communications routers (802.11a/n) for our main data feed, as well as a secondary 900MHz 1W datalink for basic telemetry and primary communications.

Antenna wise, we'll be using 4 omni antennas (2 per transmitter) on the aircraft (5dBi for the 5.8GHz, 3dBi for the 900MHz), and on the ground, we'll be using directional antennas, with a parabolic grill dish for the 900MHz link as well as a sector antenna (looks like a bar / rectangular prism) for the 5.8GHz link.
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