As we continue our work on this project we are polishing a Preliminary Design Report (PDR) presentation to deliver to our engineering liaisons and others at Northrop Grumman (NG). We were hoping to be able to take a trip to their site in Melbourne, FL to present to them face-to-face, but the decision was made to meet in a zoom conference for the presentation, scheduled for Monday, October 17, 2021. The team is excited to finally give a full, formal presentation to NG and show them the work we’ve done so far to develop a design for their tag something small project.

Aside from the presentation itself, the team is also getting ready to order hardware to begin testing and prototyping. We are considering our options of different microcontrollers we could use as a processor for all of the sensors we hope to integrate. We will likely need to test different versions of sensors for each type of data we would like to collect before we arrive at a realistic system level design. We will be ordering sensors next week to begin testing as soon as possible to see what will fit with our design concept. The material to be used for the device housing is also being researched in depth, mostly using CAD software and finite element analysis at this point, and we will make orders to acquire the desired material when the research is concluded.