Bench Inspection

On Friday we had our bench inspection. Our chance to display our project work and present our research, thought process and finished result.

We were assessed by two people, a laboratory demonstrator and our supervisor. With the demonstrator we answered his questions at ease but received no feedback for any of our work so we were clueless to how well we had done.
Our supervisor gave us more constructive criticism, most notably our poster was too text heavy and seemed to be in a fairly illogical order, though visually pleasing. Aside from this he was happy with our presentation and the answer we gave to his challenging questions.

We felt that it was a successful day and are happy with the final result, though this could be vastly improved upon if we had a bigger time scale. We just need to work on our project report now which is due in a couple of weeks.

Our poster:

full size image here

A link to our poster is

Progress

We have successfully completed the complete circuit diagrams for the UAV:

Here you can see the three motors connected to the two h-bridges which are in turn connected to the Arduino UNO, this also has the sonar attachment and has a voltage supplied to it.

The start of the laboratory session began by using a track cutter and testing the h-bridge soldered last week. We soon discovered it wasn't working and presumed we blew the h-bridge by attempting to test it without the tracks cut last week. Therefore we needed to solder a new h-bridge, this was quickly done and tested, working correctly with the motors on patchboard. Once we were sure of it working a second was produced.

Code also got developed, a blog post containing the current code will be posted shortly. The sonar/ultrasound code was tested using a green and red LED[1]:

Holes were placed into film canisters to house the motor, with one hole for the wires and one for the shaft of the motor[2]. Our plan is to recreate waterproofing recommended on several hobby websites, an example video is below. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIcCz5m9LwQ

After tweaking the code and switching the h-bridges and motors from the patchboard to a DC power supply we tested the circuit all together:

Tasks for next meeting:

Complete testing of the circuit

Start waterproofing motors

Implement solution to propeller/shaft connections

Use an external supply (9v) batteries

Think about buoyancy.


References:
[1]Arduino and HC-SR04 Example, http://www.instructables.com/id/Simple-Arduino-and-HC-SR04-Example/, Feb 2014
[2]MIT Sea Pearch Construction Manual, http://seaperch.mit.edu/docs/seaperch-build-october2011.pdf, Feb 2014