Our meetings with Dr Ho for discussions started as early as January 2020. As such, the scope of our project had underwent a number of changes before settling on our final idea.
Initial Phase
Initially, we were keen to continue the Energy Efficient Balloon Bot for Volcano Surveillance that was done by 2 previous batches of M&T students in 2018 and 2019. By mid-March 2020, we already had at least 2 meetups with Dr Ho and visited the MnT lab to take a look at the equipment left behind by the seniors (we were however encouraged by Tony to just buy brand new equipment)
We had also started sending out emails to Prof Cesare Soci and Prof Benoit Taisne requesting to meet up after learning through the 2018 group’s blog (see Week 0: 7-11 May)that they were approached for advice in the past iterations of this project.
Email sent to Prof Cesare, dated 23 April 2020
Email sent to Prof Benoit, dated 14 April
Sadly, neither Professor replied to our email. This was made worse by the fact that the circuit breaker was announced at the start of April, meaning that all of us had to stay home, and that MnT was delayed to start in special term II. Towards the end of the circuit breaker, we were still unsure as to whether or not the COVID situation would improve and allow us to work in big groups or even go to the field to fly (CAAS did explicitly say it)
With that, E2B2_V3 was shelved…
Prototype
One fine day, Pro Benoit emailed Dr Ho and asked if M&T was running. Although we were quite peeved that this mean that me missed out our email, we agreed to host a zoom meeting with him to discuss the further steps to take regarding our project.
Prof Benoit’s email to Dr Ho
Final Product
Based on the meeting with Prof Benoit, we came up with the idea of building data loggers capable of transmitting data to a UAV.
This was in line with the nature of his research involving scenarios where retrieving the data loggers to download data is problematic (eg. retrieving collected data in hilly terrain, on the surface of the sea, or near volcanos)
UAV Specifications
Airframe: X-UAV Skysurfer
Motor: XXD A2212 1000KV
ESC: 40A, 4s capable
Battery: Alternated between Kanesh’s puffy 2200mAh lipos and some nice Tattu 1800mAh bought from Taobao
Receiver: Frsky XM+ with sbus-pwm converter
Transmitter: Radiomaster TX16s