Wednesday, June 11, 2008
New Boards
Well, the boards are starting to roll in, so I thought I'd provide a brief rundown on what's here so far. First up is the new relay board:
This board passes all the power in the sub, and is responsible for turning the sub on and off, as well as managing the competition-required kill switch for the motors. A number of improvements have been made, but the most important one is better protection for the AVR that reads the status of the switch, so we have fewer problems using it for the secondary function of starting the run while potentially disconnected. This is a step towards being slightly less reliant on a connection to start the sub: we may well get one shot at a run, instead of zero, even when we lack a decent wireless connection.
Next up is an interim sonar solution. It works reasonably well, but is targetted solely at 2008:
The two LEDs on top are power indicators, while the three arranged vertically each light briefly for a ping received on a particular hydrophone.
It is a signal conditioning board that allows relatively simple digital processing to measure time-difference of arrival. Finally, here's a shot of the bottom:
The boards were fabricated by Advanced Circuits, and were populated very rapidly by a great local company called CDS. We did modify a couple spots due to some design oversights, but it's turning out well overall. It's getting close to time to take these out to the pool now. ¶ MichaelP @ 17:05
This board passes all the power in the sub, and is responsible for turning the sub on and off, as well as managing the competition-required kill switch for the motors. A number of improvements have been made, but the most important one is better protection for the AVR that reads the status of the switch, so we have fewer problems using it for the secondary function of starting the run while potentially disconnected. This is a step towards being slightly less reliant on a connection to start the sub: we may well get one shot at a run, instead of zero, even when we lack a decent wireless connection.
Next up is an interim sonar solution. It works reasonably well, but is targetted solely at 2008:
The two LEDs on top are power indicators, while the three arranged vertically each light briefly for a ping received on a particular hydrophone.
It is a signal conditioning board that allows relatively simple digital processing to measure time-difference of arrival. Finally, here's a shot of the bottom:
The boards were fabricated by Advanced Circuits, and were populated very rapidly by a great local company called CDS. We did modify a couple spots due to some design oversights, but it's turning out well overall. It's getting close to time to take these out to the pool now. ¶ MichaelP @ 17:05
