Notes

Team · TU/e · est. 2021

Student Team Daedalus

Team Daedalus is a multidisciplinary student team at Eindhoven University of Technology, founded in 2021 and based at the TU/e Innovation Space: 39 students from more than 15 countries building a solar-powered autonomous aircraft for prolonged aerial surveillance, aimed at wildfire detection. Airframes, avionics and power electronics are all designed, manufactured and tested in-house, in iterative prototypes called Lapyx — each one a refinement of the last, each crash folded into the next build.

The current aircraft, Lapyx 4, has a 4.0 m wingspan, weighs 9.2 kg, carries 225 W of solar cells across the upper wing and three 16 Ah cells in the fuselage, and flies with a fully integrated autopilot. Its maiden flight on 25 February 2026 ran in both manual and autopilot modes, completed a 100 km/h speed test and validated an estimated endurance of about seven hours on battery alone — before a mechanical failure cut the power and ended the flight in a crash. The team rebuilt it over the spring; the second flight was planned for September 2026.

I joined in January 2026 as an electrical engineer, one of six in the Electrical / Embedded Systems department, and was a member until 14 October 2026. The department owns the aircraft’s electronics — the systems in development include the Daedawatt Ultra MPPT solar charge controller, the DaedaLink avionics bus, the DaedaFind LTE/GNSS tracker and the DaedaBuzz recovery buzzer — and my part of it was PCB design, embedded programming and bench verification.

The electronics are built alongside seven other departments — mechanical and airframe, avionics, computer and machine vision, business, PR and communication, the board — so a board is designed against an airframe that is being built at the same time, a power budget the solar array sets, and avionics written by someone else. The rebuild after the maiden flight worked the same way: the crash’s lessons had to be carried into every subsystem at once, with the second flight already on the calendar for September.

Department

Electrical / Embedded Systems

Role

PCB design · embedded programming · bench verification

Member

January – 14 October 2026

Team

teamdaedalus.eu ↗

BSc Electrical Engineering · TU/e · 180 ECTS · 2025 – 28

Curriculum

The three-year program, laid out the way TU/e schedules it: four quartiles a year, five credits a course, with the first-year challenge and the bachelor project spanning two quartiles at ten. Year one is complete, with a weighted average of 9.58 / 10. The first half of year two is what I am enrolled in now; everything after that is the plan as it stands, electives included. Each course is listed as its code, its title and its credits in ECTS.