UTD AUV Team - Status
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Computer recovery
Thursday evening, I discovered that the harddrive in the vehicle had died. Because of the uncertain history of the old drive, we already had a replacement drive on order; it should arrive early next week. Until then, we will be operating off of a spare that I had for a separate project.
I have spent all of today installing Gentoo on the new drive, and I intend to save a drive image as soon as everything works properly. We have restored all of the old functionality except for image capture. I am currently trying to get the capture software installed without stooping to installing X, but I will if I have to.
UPDATE: I have gotten the cameras to work; I will reboot the computer so that it's running off of wall power and grab a filesystem image so we don't ever have to go through this again.
While I try and get the computer sorted out, Wes, Danny, and a few others have taken the hull to make some final modifications (such as adding a kill switch). I took care of the depth sensor and Ethernet connection problems yesterday. Hopefully, we'll be back in the water tomorrow evening doing some testing. I will be back in the morning to do some finalization of the vision stuff. ¶ kd5bjo @ 03:01, 0 comments
I have spent all of today installing Gentoo on the new drive, and I intend to save a drive image as soon as everything works properly. We have restored all of the old functionality except for image capture. I am currently trying to get the capture software installed without stooping to installing X, but I will if I have to.
UPDATE: I have gotten the cameras to work; I will reboot the computer so that it's running off of wall power and grab a filesystem image so we don't ever have to go through this again.
While I try and get the computer sorted out, Wes, Danny, and a few others have taken the hull to make some final modifications (such as adding a kill switch). I took care of the depth sensor and Ethernet connection problems yesterday. Hopefully, we'll be back in the water tomorrow evening doing some testing. I will be back in the morning to do some finalization of the vision stuff. ¶ kd5bjo @ 03:01, 0 comments
Thursday, July 13, 2006
DPRG Picnic
Sorry for the lack of posts recently. We were all busy getting stuff ready for the DPRG picnic last Saturday, and I didn't have time to stop and write down what was done. On Friday night, the sub followed the swimlane stripe on the bottom of the Waterview pool perfectly. Various other things were tested, and Wes worked on sonar into the night.
Saturday morning, we packed everything up and headed to the picnic.Unlike previous years, we had the sub running in the pool within 15 minutes of arriving. There were no leakage problems, but the Texas sun limited our runtime to only an hour before things shut down because of being overheated. We took the sub into John's house, and opened up the tube to let it air out while we ate lunch. There were no heat problems for the remainder of the day, probably because it became overcast.
I practiced and demonstrated onsite vision system training, and got satisfactory results off of as few as three images. Several hours later, the vision system showed no signs of breaking down, despite changing lighting conditions. The actual camera is rotated inside its watertight enclosure, so it doesn't line up orthogonally with the vehicle frame when properly secured. I need to add a calibration parameter to the vision system to correct for this.
The sonar guys were trying to track down a glitch in the firmware all day with little success. I understand that since then, they have found and corrected the problem. In the late afternoon, the PIC programmer stopped working, and they retreated to the lab to get things going again.
I have been taking a break after the hecticness, and started working again yesterday by documenting the vision system for the paper and website. Most of the mechanical changes have been made, and we should be back in the water today. ¶ kd5bjo @ 13:50, 0 comments
Saturday morning, we packed everything up and headed to the picnic.Unlike previous years, we had the sub running in the pool within 15 minutes of arriving. There were no leakage problems, but the Texas sun limited our runtime to only an hour before things shut down because of being overheated. We took the sub into John's house, and opened up the tube to let it air out while we ate lunch. There were no heat problems for the remainder of the day, probably because it became overcast.
I practiced and demonstrated onsite vision system training, and got satisfactory results off of as few as three images. Several hours later, the vision system showed no signs of breaking down, despite changing lighting conditions. The actual camera is rotated inside its watertight enclosure, so it doesn't line up orthogonally with the vehicle frame when properly secured. I need to add a calibration parameter to the vision system to correct for this.
The sonar guys were trying to track down a glitch in the firmware all day with little success. I understand that since then, they have found and corrected the problem. In the late afternoon, the PIC programmer stopped working, and they retreated to the lab to get things going again.
I have been taking a break after the hecticness, and started working again yesterday by documenting the vision system for the paper and website. Most of the mechanical changes have been made, and we should be back in the water today. ¶ kd5bjo @ 13:50, 0 comments
