The day has come! We traveled to the CACI site in Sarasota to give our Preliminary Design Report presentation and get a closer look at the system we will be working with. The two-hour drive gave us some time to relax as a team, play games like Wordle, and prepare for the day ahead.

Once on site, our PDR presentation ended up feeling less like a formal presentation and more like a large conversation with several members of the CACI team. This gave us the opportunity to discuss our design ideas in greater detail, ask questions, and receive feedback that helped clarify the direction of the project.

We also spent a significant amount of time inspecting the pedestals and discussing possible methods for mounting our prototype. Being able to examine the hardware in person gave us a much better understanding of the physical constraints we will need to account for in our design. We were also given two working motors and one broken motor that we can use for development, testing, and comparison throughout the prototyping process.

Following these discussions, the project has shifted in a slightly different direction than we originally anticipated, but nothing too drastic. With a clearer understanding of the system, access to hardware for testing, and a more defined path forward, we are excited to get started on building and testing our prototype!