PDR

The Preliminary Design Review (PDR) is the first milestone of the CanSat Hungary competition. In just two pages, the teams must introduce their proposals and plans for the competition. Given the strict parameters and requirements, it must be completed perfectly to mitigate the risk of elimination.

One of the most important aspects of this document is to present our Secondary Mission. Since it's critical to have a good mission, we worked on it for a long period of time, consulting with our teachers and mentor—to ensure it was suitable. The actual execution is critical in the selection process, so finding a balance between something challenging and something implementable, was a long and careful process.

As for our mission, we developed a unique idea. Our mission aims to complete three objectives:

1. Deploy a delayed second parachute
2. Demonstrate a lower descending speed after the ejection
3. Predicting the right time to deploy 

The most challenging part of our mission is the parachute control. Space is extremely limited, and  every piece of  fabric counts. Designing and folding one parachute is a challenge by itself, but managing two is significantly more difficult.

Crucially, the second parachute will be held in place until deployment with an electromagnet. We will be using special, differently sized area-maximizing parachutes. We are eager to start testing, the goals are clear!


And so, after a week of writing and confirming every little detail, we submitted our document in and successfully advanced to the next round.

The successful submission and acceptance of our PDR marks a significant and validating first step. It confirms that our proposed design and our Secondary Mission are both technically sound and compliant with the CanSat Hungary regulations. The challenge now shifts from paper to prototype. We are moving into the building phase, where we will translate our validated plans into tangible hardware and software. We're excited to begin testing and iterating to ensure our final CanSat performs exactly as predicted.

Want to follow our journey as we start building? You can explore our full PDR document and the first lines of our flight code on our GitHub repository. Stay tuned for updates on our build process!


Author:
Sárossy Illés