PSAS/ news/ 2007-01-31 - Intro. and General Meeting

Introduction to PSAS

Many of us feel that we should be recruiting more undergraduate and graduate students into PSAS. Sarah, as our student club president, arranged for flyers to be posted around campus, arranged for to intro meetings, and did a fantastic job of presenting our project to the new folks who showed up. I believe we had 5 people Wednesday and about 7 on Friday - not a huge crowd, but everyone was pretty excited about the project. In fact on Wednesday, we even had a new Boeing (an ME) drive down from Seattle to see how he could get involved!

We had pizza at both meetings, and we hope to continue getting more people involved this year. Although more new people may place a greater burden on some of the experienced folk, we all think the 'mentoring' is worth it and will get us to our goals more quickly in the long run.

General Team Meeting

We had General Meetings after the Wednesday's meeting. Teams gave a status report on what was going on.

Airframe

The airframe team has handed off the new modules to Clackamas Community College to have them machined out. They're planning on fiberglassing in the next few months, and they finally decided on a new recovery system to try.

Avionics

As soon as the airframe team designs and tests a recover system, we're going to start working on a recovery node. Until then, we're finally starting on sensor designs for future USB nodes. Sarah is working on USB firmware, and we'll start working on some sort of infrastructure code for the LPC2148s this spring.

Software

The software team has begun new flight computer software code that is based around a new simulator project. They're also busy trying to revamp our wiki from moinmoin to ikiwiki (or better).

Schedule for 2007

Our current plan is to launch this summer from Bend, OR or (latest) at Black Rock 2007 (September 28th, 2007?).

The rough outline of our plan is something like this: