The Sitting Duck

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project came from Hurricane Dorian and the overwhelming amount of people that this natural disaster has affected.

What it does

The Sitting Duck is a fixed wing drone that helps distribute goods to people in need during natural disasters. This drone will fly over the disaster area and drop emergency packages for families and people in need. These packages will include things such as food (MRE's), water filtration, power banks, matches, and other survival materials.

How we built it

We built this fixed-wing by printing out blueprints and hand cutting each piece out of foam board material with razor blades and X-Acto knives. We then hot glued the pieces together and wired the lights, transmitter and other various parts throughout the drone. Our last build was a prototype of the emergency packages that the drone would distribute during a natural disaster.

Challenges we ran into

Although we did run into a fair amount of challenges, the biggest one we faced was not being able to use the CNC machine to help us cut out the pieces of our fixed-wing. We had hoped that the CNC machine could cut out all the plane parts for us but since the plans were too complicated we had to do them by hand. This resulted in us having less time than we anticipated but nevertheless, we still completed our drone.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As many know, the biggest goal with any unmanned aircraft is to make sure your aircraft flies. The accomplishment we are most proud of is the fact that the Sitting Duck flies! We also had many smaller victories such as building the prototype emergency package, working as a team, solving problems together and managing to stay awake for almost 24 hours straight.

What we learned

Teamwork, Perseverance , Time Management During a hackathon you face a lot of challenges and many happy surprises as well. What we learned during this hackathon was how to really work as a team. The three main things we learned were teamwork, perseverance, and time management. We can take all three of these things back to our own lives and use them like we never could before.

What's next for The Sitting Duck

The next step for the Sitting Duck would be to maximize the capacity for exactly what we can fit in the drone to provide the most for the people we are trying to help. We would be finding smaller supplies and more sturdy materials to make this project better.

Built With

• brushlessmotors
• flysky
• foamboard
• pwm
• servomotors