Project Update - Making good progress!

It's been a while since we posted our last update, and so far we have made progress in both mechanical and electronics aspects of the design.

Electronics Design

We have pretty much completed the design and fabrication of our electronics components. Here are some pictures:

Figure 1

Figure 2

Programming

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Basically, joystick will controls two motors in motor shield and four motors in L298N H-bridge motor controller respectively. The four motors purposely use for the rover sinking and floating whereas the two motors use by the rover to move forward and backwards underwater. The two motors also use for the rover to turn left and turn right. Figure 3 shows how our electronics things connected while we are coding the program. Figure 4 and 5 show our program on how we control the motors by joystick.The full coding for the joystick and the motors will be in the link below. 
http://pastebin.com/2VKUcrTd

Figure 6

Getting visuals from the camera is simple. All we have to do is activate a special serial pass-through mode on the Arduino, so that serial data from the camera is converted to a format the computer can read over USB. Then, it's just a matter of using a special program known as Comtool to control the camera. Here is the link to give the instruction to code a camera program. https://learn.adafruit.com/ttl-serial-camera/using-comm-tool

Mechanical Fabrication

On the other hand, for the mechanical sector, we have made the body and mounted the L bars for the motors. So the mainframe of the rover is more or less done. However, for the head the design had to be redone as the idea of mounting a flat frontal surface was not ideal for waterproofing.

                          

The above pictures show the mainframe of the rover without the head.

Above is the initial design for our head which was scrapped due to its inability to be properly waterproofed.

 For our new head the designed we decided to change it so that the design allow the cap to press fit into the cylinder proving a better water tight seal and but moving the LED mount into the cap we also limit the possibility of leakage thus improving the waterproofness of the body.

Forces

Estimated Forward Thrust = 6.7004 N

Estimated Forward Thrust with safety margin of 1.5 = 10.0051 N

Estimated Upward Thrust = 13.4008 N

The forces are estimated from the data from the experiment conducted in week 4 and 5.

Reflection

From our concept report and other earlier publications, we received some feedback. Here is the feedback, and responses from our team:

1) Can VC0706 Camera Arduino only take an image? Will your camera be providing a feed to a screen or will you be taking pictures?

For this prototype, we will only be focusing on taking pictures at 1.5 meters deep, at locations deemed hazardous for divers. Such environment includes the low oxygen levels, 

water that is polluted or water bodies that have predators that could kill the diver. 

Our camera will be attached to a PC where it shows a live feed of the camera. The desired images will be taken by the controls of the computer, just how you would take photos normally with a digital camera.

2)  How many led you guys using? Why you guys using the normal LED when you guys can use circular LED that gives much more better vision and resolution for the camera?

We are using two 1.9 Voltage High Brightness LEDs. We did consider using circular LED and in fact wanted to use it. However, the circular LED is quite heavy. Given that our robot is already around 3.2kg, by including the circular LED, it will add additional weight will result in more thrust needed to float the boat. In addition, the two LED were tested out and they are bright enough to light up the surroundings, using the circular LED may be an overkill.

3) Where are you guys want to position your motor? Please be more specific.   

We are placing our motor at the horizontal edges of the robot, 3 on the left and 3 on the right. This is to get the most moment out of the thrust of the motors when needing to rotate the robot.

4)  Acrylic is brittle and not suitable for Crash Barrier

The speed of the motor is not fast enough to accelerate the rover to a force large enough to break the acrylic.

5)  Use a memory card shield to back up the pictures you will be taking.

The pictures are sent directly to a PC, which offers the ability to directly save the images to the hard disk.

6) Pictures being not of a decent quality, formatting and size. Unorganised and not detailed images.

Blogger does not have much flexibility in editing our pictures and images, so we had to use. We will make our images more organised and tidy in the future.