Project
My capstone, the Essential Skills it stretched, and the artifacts that tell the story.
My capstone was a VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aircraft built and flown with my sub-team. Starting in January, we sourced and salvaged electronics, brought up a Pixhawk flight controller with ESCs, motors, GPS, and servos, and pushed through a long arc of firmware, parameter, and wiring problems in Mission Planner. By spring we had the airframe converted from raw RCIN control to Pixhawk-driven flight, DSHOT running on the AUX ports, the V-tail and third motor mounted, and the parameters tuned far enough that the aircraft could fly mostly automatically. My role moved between troubleshooting (oscilloscope work on the servos, ESC calibration), research (flight modes, wireless telemetry), team coordination, and hands-on assembly during the final build.
Each skill below lists the artifacts that demonstrate how I practiced it.
Diagnosing why hardware/firmware wasn't behaving and reasoning through fixes.
Servos refused to run when plugged into the Pixhawk. I tracked down oscilloscope prongs, probed the signal lines to isolate the fault, then followed the ArduPilot documentation to re-clock the servos and get them moving correctly.
All three motors would spin on the RC radio but the Pixhawk wouldn't calibrate the ESCs. I worked through alternative calibration paths and parameter combinations until we identified what was blocking Mission Planner from seeing them.
Presentations to outside audiences and written documentation for the team.
Built the slide template, rehearsed, took critique, and delivered the OtterCares presentation explaining our VTOL capstone to a non-technical audience.
Wrote up our parameter list and a comparison of ArduPilot flight modes so the rest of the team could pick the right mode for our airframe without redoing the research.
Pairing with teammates and supporting adjacent sub-teams.
Worked alongside George on the final assembly and sourced bonding agents for him, then served as a second pair of hands for Lukas while he dialed in the last details needed to actually fly.
Co-mounted the V-tail and integrated the third motor on the V1 airframe, and paired with Lukas on setting/finalizing parameters so the VTOL could fly mostly automatically.
Coming up with new approaches when the default path didn't work.
Standard motor output wasn't giving us what we needed, so I researched and configured DSHOT specifically on the Pixhawk's AUX ports — an unusual routing that let us drive the motors the way our design required.
Proposed and researched a wireless link to the VTOL so we could read live telemetry on the laptop during flight instead of being tethered by USB during testing.
Pulling answers from ArduPilot docs and applying them to our build.
Researched each individual ArduPilot flight mode, documented what each one does, and recommended the modes that best fit our VTOL's mission profile.
Figured out from documentation how to first spin the motors via RCIN, then how to hand control over to the Pixhawk so the flight controller does most of the work.
Hands-on with the flight controller, ground station, and bench tools.
Set the parameters required to enable VTOL mode in Mission Planner and got the servos running end-to-end through the ground station.
Used the oscilloscope to read the PWM signals coming out of the Pixhawk, which is how we confirmed where the servo issue actually was.
Pushing work forward without being asked.
Went out to Ace on my own to find specialized hardware so the team wouldn't be blocked once the rest of the parts arrived and we were ready to assemble.
Took the initiative to dig through previous projects with Dannahour, sort the components, and identify what we could reuse on the VTOL instead of buying new.
Adjusting when the plan or the hardware changed on us.
After getting the VTOL working over RCIN, we changed direction mid-week and converted the setup so the Pixhawk would handle control — re-wiring and re-configuring on the fly.
With most of the team away at their robotics competition, I shifted into cleaning up programming errors, re-clocking servos, and adding the third motor so progress didn't stall.
Owning the small stuff that keeps the project moving.
After losing a servo horn and not being able to recover it, I built an organization system for our parts so the team would stop losing small hardware and lose less time searching.
Helped the electrical sub-team with wiring and cable management so the airframe stayed serviceable as we kept iterating on motors and the flight controller.
Coordinating the team and following through on commitments.
Coordinated the VTOL sub-team over email with mentors and messaged the group overnight to align on where everyone was and what still needed to be done after school.
Took responsibility for finalizing old parameters and setting new ones with Lukas so the airframe was actually ready to fly, instead of leaving it half-tuned for the next person.