The last few weeks have been completely hectic with the Hackaday prize and sorting out university, things are only just starting to settle. It was really great to go over to the US for the Supercon, I enjoyed meeting everyone and I appreciate all the useful feedback I recieved. As part of winning the Hackaday prize, I hope to take up the residency at Supplyframe's DesignLab in the New Year and this will give me a three month period to focus solely on the glider. 

Over the coming weeks I'll be updating the design of the glider from v3 to v3.1, a version of the glider that I believe will be suitable for alpha kits for real world testing. During the glider update I will be testing various parts of the glider to ensure reliability and to get some performance figures.

The main testing will be on the buoyancy engine, so I have a depth rating and an understanding as to how well it performs. As the glider/buoyancy engine is quite large it will be hopefully be done in a modified water tank with a car pump attached. A camera on the inside of the tank will be used to monitor the state of the buoyancy engine to make sure there are no leaks, etc.

For those interested in kits, I appreciate the support and I am aiming at finalising the design so that I can come up with a finalised cost. I looked at printing the parts using 3D printing services but it is more effective print the parts myself, so I have purchased a CR-10 printer for printing sets of parts.

You can view the live development CAD of v3.1 here. Red is v3 parts and the blue parts are parts that have been updated to v3.1