Project Kite

Team Kite is on the crunch and getting the physical prototype ready for D-Day, AKA the Mechatronics Engineering Symposium. After all the troubleshooting and schedule conflicts, I’m very proud of the progress we made. The friendship and team bond is perhaps more important than the engineering exercise and I’m glad to have walked the path with th... Read More

In this episode, we bring to you Meishur Mk-II, something Sam has been working on for the past few weeks in tandem with our mechanical maestro - Lucas! Here is the sucessfull build that was done till date. Meishur Mk-II on a scale (circa Mar, 2024) Read More

In this update, we have some mechanical updates on the dock Joshur! Lucas has been working tirelessly on Joshur, and has been building it ever since the first conceptual design! His skill and overall sense of quality can be seen in the images below! Joshur building session with team Kite. Led by Lucas (circa Mar, 2024) Neil making sure Lu... Read More

In this episode of updates with Kite. we have updates from other mechanical maestro, Lucas, who has been tirelessly working on the Dock, heres a sneak peek of what he has been doing to it. He in the midst of fabricating it. Meanwhile, Stephen and Neil have started working on the landing portion of the mission planner, by setting up the backend ... Read More

Today, the team decided to adapt a new stratergy to counter a problematic issue with the attitude assistance meishur poesseses. Joshua alongwith the consulation of Stephen decided to add a ToF to better estimate the altitude Meishur is at. And the result was a sucess! Heres a sneakpeek to what he had done! Our mechanical maestro Samuel also f... Read More

The team found time to relax and to work on Kite during reading week. More tests on flight stabilization and GPS navigation were carried out. Some heading troubles arise but the team is on high spirit to squash the problem. As shown in the mission log below, Meishur v1 successfully navigated via the designated waypoints, but the heading referen... Read More

Hello everyone for another update on Meishur V1! Today we had the oppurtunity to shift all the electronics from the test quadcopter frame onto our custom VTOL frame, Meishur. Here is a video of the latest test we had done. Another update we would like to announce is the daughter board development. Samuel and Joshua had been working these past ... Read More

We extend a warm welcome to our latest build log update, accompanied by a significant announcement. The team is proud to unveil our official rebranding as “Kite.” As we embark on this new chapter, the steadfast collaboration of our dedicated team members remains unchanged, and together, under the banner of Kite, we are excited to share more abo... Read More

Hello everyone, Today we had done our first flight using the off the shelf quadcopter! TLDR: It was a success, but the system needs ALOT of tuning The drone (Meishur 1) that we used was installed with the FC, ESCs and other electronics that will be used for the final iteration of the UAV. You can see the demo here! We also got a hold of our... Read More

Greetings in the year 2024, and a warm welcome back to our readers! As we embark on this new year, we take a moment to reflect on our recent advancements in aircraft design and set the stage for upcoming developments. Preceding the turn of the year, a significant achievement was made with the successful integration of sensors into the flight c... Read More

Greetings Everyone, and welcome back to another exhilarating progress update! Today marked a monumental milestone as we unveiled our groundbreaking invention and unveiled our ambitious plans to take flight with our VTOL. Drumroll, please, as we proudly christen our entire inspection system: Project MeishurVision, and its stellar docking station... Read More

Hey there, readers! Welcome back to another round of updates from our dynamic team. We’ve been buzzing with excitement, and we can’t wait to spill the beans on what’s been happening behind the scenes. Our software wizards have been burning the midnight oil, and we’re thrilled to report that the test drone is getting some serious TLC. Picture th... Read More

The Crafting Guild Unites! Pixelated Progress Report 🌈 Ahoy, fellow crafters of Kite! Today, we unveil the whimsical wonders and pixelated adventures of the past few days in our Minecraft-inspired crafting saga. ⚙ Gears and Gizmos: A Redstone Odyssey! In the enchanted world of crafting, our dynamic duo, Josh and Stephen, have been tirelessly ... Read More

Drone Drama: Lucas’ Glider, Stephen’s Shopping Spree, and Joshua, Samuel, and Neil’s Safety Circus! Welcome to the (totally) filler episode of Kite’s adventures. Today the team went on a mindstorms session to discuss safety procedures, order parts, and pave the path in making Kite a reality Off to the drone races Our man Lucas has been on a m... Read More

Recap of recent events In our recent team meeting, we presented a comprehensive update on the activities from the past week. Notably, we had the privilege of meeting with Professor Jatin Nathwani, a distinguished expert in the field from the Department of Civil Engineering. During this meeting, Professor Nathwani agreed to facilitate key introdu... Read More

FDP Discussion and parts recommendation We had productive session with professor Sanjeev where we discussed the following for the Final Design Presentation (FDP): A parts list that outlines specs and engineering decisions as to why these parts were picked needs to be outlined clearly A CAD model with engineering analysis done on the system.... Read More

Met With Sriram Suryanarayan After attending the Kinetrics Lunch and Learn event on Sept. 27th, we were able to set up a virtual meeting with Sriram Suryanarayan (Director of Innovation), who wanted to hear more about our initial proposals. Unfortunately, we were unable to get much useful information. Afterwards, he asked for our team informat... Read More

Outreach After speaking to our advisor, he suggested we reach out to Professor Mahesh. We learned that OPG was not in fact our primary contact, transmission line inspection is actually done by Hydro-One. We also learned that the primary thing being inspected are the insulators on the transmission lines. Their failure is uncommon, but calamitous... Read More

While we are waiting for stakeholders to tell us the challenges and requirements in our project, we wanted to get opinions from our advisors about the feasibility of our favourite solutions. Fixed-Wing VTOL or Quadcopter Like most other capstone project groups, what drew us together was an ambitious engineering concept. That is an autonomously... Read More

Outreach We thought that roads and bridges in the trans-Canada highway were critical pieces of infrastruture that stretch over vast parts of rural Canada. That’s why we wanted to make contact with civil engineers who inspected and repaired them. An engineer in the City of Kitchener pointed us to two the two firms that the city contracted for br... Read More

Problem Statement Remote infrastructure in sparsely-populated regions are hard-to-reach by technicians, making inspection and repair costly both in terms of time and money. Automating the process with robots or other technologies will improve reliability of infrastructure. Mind-directed-graph-Map We brainstormed a variety of solutions and rou... Read More