Agenda
Team and project updates: we'll hear what everyone has been up to, the status of their projects, the status of the innovation grants, avionics system, software projects, etc. We're in a very different place than we were a year ago, and it'll be good to catch up on what everyone is doing.
Group discussion on ITAR and open source: this is a big deal to a lot of people: it's hard to be an open source group if you can't be open due to federal regulations. We'll discuss the different sides, and form an action plan to deal with this over the next few weeks.
Helping newbies: how can we make our group better for new people? How can we get people working on PSAS-related projects, without taking too much time from getting the project done?
Priorities: What are our priorities? And with those priorities, what projects should we be focusing our energies on? And what's next? Launch in spring? What's our short term goals?
Meeting Notes
We went around the table and did a individual and team update. Some of the highlights are:
- Avionics
- GFE done and ready to fab!
- Battery sensor board next
- FC done and needs software work.
- Software (Jamey and Josh)
- v3 3 axis physics simulator (BPF) "event-driven-fc"
- Nathan's orbital trajectories work will hopefully fold into this.
- Innovation Grant: GPS attitude (Dan, Rob, Jeremy)
- Only tangentially related to PSAS
- Innovation Grant: Liquid Motor (Ben)
- 50 lb kerosene/lox motor
- Innovation Grant: 6 DOF control hardware (Chris, Dave, AndrewL)
- Grant to build the necessary control hardware
- We have 20 seats of SolidWorks 2010 (Go Ben)
We've heard from a few groups considering trying for the NASA Nanosatellite Launch Challenge. We're not going to try as an independent group, but if we can, we could help those groups who need an avionics/control system.
We discussed ITAR, and decided the best thing to do is go directly to the state department and get clarification of where we land.
For the next round of innovation grants, we should really submit one just for the rocket itself. We should be able to fund a launch off of that. Also: revamped launch tower?
We discussed our inability to keep new people, and both newbies and ex-newbies (!) like Kenny chimed in. Here are some of the things we decided would help new people:
- Restart General meetings
- Includes team and individual updates, prioritization of projects, and time to meet and discuss with no technical work.
- Start on time :)
- Discuss what's going to get done in the next week.
- Better, longer, more-in-depth intro meetings to provide more context.
- More effort to break projects up into doable small chunks.
- Prune, or at least mark, deprecated content in the wiki.
It was a good re-launch of general meetings... thanks everyone who attended!
General todos
- Begin pruning/marking wiki content (EVERYONE!)
- Need more fund-raising
- Begin clearing up ITAR restrictions.
This week
- Send off and buy components for GFE
- Find out about SolidWorks PDM
- ITAR meeting on Friday morning, 10am, in the CS lounge.
- Validate nozzle math on liquid motor project.