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Greetings!

The only project currently seeing active work is OHKLA, the suborbital hybrid rocket project, which is currently enjoying a bit of a burst of activity.  Furthermore, your experience sounds more or less like exactly what we need.

With regards to communication and location, our avionics module is going to engage in both – we need to radio transmit GPS coordinates after landing to facilitate recovery.  With regards to fabrication, we're almost certainly going to end up welding together a nitrous oxide oxidiser tank (needs to hold about 750 psi) and a combustion chamber.  With regards to automation, we've not really planned much of it yet, but we're going to need some sort of mechanism for separating sections of the rocket body to facilitate parachute deployment.

If you want to jump in to some current work on either of these fronts, this thread is mostly dealing with the selection of materials for the tank and chamber; this thread discusses an overall architectural decision which we could use another mech eng's opnion on,  and this thread has some outlines of the overall form of our avionics module.  If you read each of these you should be at least more or less up to speed with what we're looking at currently.  Unfortunately the wiki is probably quite out of date with regards to OHKLA at the moment, although it should still fill you in on the basic background stuff.

Please feel free to post any questions in these threads or back here.  Basically you can just start commenting and working wherever you think you can be the most help, or you can ask in here for more specific guidance and I am sure we'll be able to come up with tasks for you.