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Weekend Pool Test
We've been working hard all weekend trying to get SeaBee II up and working again. Our faulty thruster from last year's competition that caused us innumerable headaches has finally been purged from the vehicle. We replaced it with one of the new thrusters that had been purchased for SeaBee III. That was the final fix we needed to take care of the ( Read more... ) -
Pool Test and Plans for Next Weekend
We are starting to get back into the swing of things and today we had the first successful pool test we have had in a while. Due to a compass breakdown before getting into the water, we were not able to test the PID tuning for the roll, pitch, or heading. We were, however, able to test the new external pressure sensor as well as tune the depth PID ( Read more... ) -
Things are coming together
Wow, things have been coming together really quickly in the past few days. The carrier board is now completely assembled, and we've gotten both computers to boot up and run linux! Unfortunately, due to a cable mixup we're short one hard drive cable (why does no one seem to carry 44-pin IDE cables in Los Angeles??) so we're going to have to wait ( Read more... ) -
She Boots!
Yay! I just finished getting the rest of the COM-A components and the power regulation bits on the board and plugged her into the power supply. Within a few seconds the monitor showed a beautiful BIOS loading screen, and then a "Please insert proper boot media" message!! I guess the lesson learned is take multimeter readings with a grain of salt ( Read more... ) -
Multimeter Weirdness, and the Final Assembly
Sorry I haven't been updating this thing as much as I'd like to, but it's been a really busy week. We finally got the main carrier board in on Thursday, and I've been soldering some of the main bits on in between working on this journal paper. Something very strange is happening with this carrier board, though. I'm going to write out the whole ( Read more... ) -
The BeeSTEM can talk
For the past week or so, I've been writing out all of the communications protocols and handlers for the new (cleverly named) IO/Motorcontroller chip, the BeeSTEM. It's definately been slow going, but finally around 6pm last night I got this:
seabee@seabee-a:~/saliency$ bin/test-BeeSTEM ( Read more... ) -
Hydrophones, hardware, and a website!
As Mike said just a couple of days ago, things are really starting to come together for us. I just did an overhaul on the team site at http://ilab.usc.edu/uscr and I think that it turned out pretty well. But that was long overdue and just needed to be done. What is exciting though is that all ( Read more... ) -
Pipe Detection and Planning
We are now able to detect orange pipes and find their direction using the hough transform. Watch the video below for a demonstration:
In other news, we had a meeting today, during which, we came up with an outline of how our planning code is going to work for the competition ( Read more... ) -
Thrusters are thrusting!
Today we got three thrusters at a time to thrust underwater while running off the battery pack! I'm really happy with the power board's performance so far, and so it looks like all of that hard design work is going to pay off. It's really nice to be able to plug in both the power supply and the batteries and switch which supplies the current on the ( Read more... ) -
Low Level Bits And Pieces
Andrew and I have been hard at work for the past few days getting our motor driver / IO / power distribution board up and running and trying to get some of the lower level microcontroller code together. Unfortunately, the onboard microcontroller isn't letting us program it, but I assume that it's because we burned it out when soldering it. ( Read more... )
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