Progress Report: February 2019

January and February were busy months with the deadline to finish getting closer and closer. But with lots of hard work and a few late nights, we have completed a finalised design! And that's not all...

1. A second bake sale

On January 15th, we set up a second bake sale, this time we increased the price of the cakes and had more time to sell, resulting in us making £54.60. We have tried getting in contact with multiple companies for sponsorship over the project, although we have had no response from them yet. Even though we have not gained any sponsors, we were lucky enough to get a £300 grant from the school.

2. Stress test

Although its bends to the right, a battery will placed in a vacant space between the supports to absorb the moment created.

3. Outreach project: The Egg-Drop Challenge

We also ran a house competition for about 120 year 7s: The Egg-Drop Challenge. Each team was given an egg - using materials they had to create a capsule to protect the egg which will be dropped from a 3m height. Those that survive had to give a short presentation, of which the winners were chosen from.

Read the full blog here

4. Parachute detachment systems

For our parachute dropping mechanism, we had four possible methods: Cutting it, spinning motor, using a hook and using a solenoid. Cutting the strings would have been an issue as when the parachute get let off the strings were likely to get caught in the blades from our motors Hooking the parachute off would have been a better option as we can choose when to release the parachute. Next month we will continue to test our CanSat and parachute.

5. Testing of quadcopter system

We discovered that a system with only one motor would cause rapid rotation due to the moments caused by the DC motor. We had seen this in our tests when the body was spinning to oppose the moment created on the rotor. This is due to Newton’s third law of motion which states every force applied has an equal and opposite reaction force of the same type to oppose it.

Read the full post here

6. Progress Report

After lots of testing and different projects, a lot of time has been dedicated to completing the progress report. With half term it was difficult to reach the whole team and eventually we had to hand in the project late, but complete.

We have completed a finalised design and next month we will focus on testing and slight modifications so not to cause any major design re-work. Some of the team are also off to the regionals! Keep an eye on the blog for the latest...