These past few weeks, electrical has been ramping up for an exciting year of electrical work, and our on-boarding of building a mini-sonar scanning system with Arduino went very well! We’ve onboarded many freshmen interested in forwarding our goals of electrical robustness, reliability, and innovation and we can’t wait to continue and finish electrical projects.
Electrical Reliability Projects
We have finally fixed Oogway’s infamous battery cable, with the help of mechanical. We’ve decided to completely rip out the old battery connector and hardwire an 8-gauge wire from one of Oogway’s bottom ports to the cap of the battery capsule. So far in on-land testing, this seems to be a much more reliable connection and has not failed yet.
We have also fixed the mono-camera and depth-AI camera on Oogway, as we debugged and found out that the fuse in our boost converter had blown. It was replaced and re-inserted back into Oogway, and this also seems to be a reliable connection thus far.
Other smaller reliability fixes have been conducted on both bots: crush’s resistor and relay solder joints were fixed, the temp and humidity sensors on both bots were debugged and fixed, and the extra-long inter-capsule cable on Crush was shortened.
Electrical Stack on a Board
Many of our freshman have been also working on replicating Crush’s electrical stack on a board for easier on-land testing and also easy debugging. They’ve made great progress on this and have build the entire power stack and most of the signal stack!
Acoustics
Our acoustics team is back, and better than ever! We have a team ready and actively tackling the challenges of using both hardware and software to try and filter noise from the actual pinger. They’ve just gotten started continuing the work from last year, but I’m confident this year our acoustics will be reliable and robust.
That’s it for now folks. We’re excited to get even more electrical reliability on both bots and also start on other projects, such as temp/humidity control and a PCB for ESCs, soon! Thanks for reading!
– The Electrical Leads