We’re excited to share that our new PCB stack is officially real and not just in simulation software and on planning documents anymore. After a lot of planning, iteration, and design work, we now have two PCBs ordered and in progress. Our thruster side, the backplane and ESC holder PCBS are the ones ordered. This …
Read more “PCB Stack is Cooking Better than a Pancake Stack”
PCB Stack Design Underway! Over the past few weeks, we’ve been deep in the process of redesigning our robot’s electronics from the ground up. Instead of continuing to patch together incremental fixes on top of last year’s FAILING jumper wires and bus bars, we decided it was time to step back and rethink the entire …
PCB Development We’ve tried so hard, and we’ve gotten incredibly far! Over the course of the past month, we’ve rapidly worked to finalize our list of components, begin ordering larger parts for preliminary testing, and laying out initial PCB designs. The following diagrams describe our overall architecture and describe the various boards currently being designed, …
New Project! Custom PCBs for the Electrical Stack As you’ll read about in the next few sections, many of our challenges come from wiring messes and broken boards. What’s the fix? Consolidate our hardware stack onto a set of in-house PCBs that can easily connect and are hot-swappable. This should be a great opportunity for …
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. …
Read more “Electrical Reliability Improved: What the Electrical Team Has Been Up To!”
Now that the mechanical subteam has completed the internal structure of our minibot, Crush, the electrical team has been hard at work hooking up all the wiring. Our veterans, Joyce and Carson, worked on prepping and routing the intercapsule Ethernet cable. Since working with Ethernet cable is always challenging, we bought screw terminal blocks that …
Following our successful pool test, we confirmed that the new serial communications system works as intended, and both Arduino systems are operating properly. With this milestone achieved, our next steps involve migrating the system into our ROS2 repository and reorganizing the code structure. While our current structure does abstract sensor functions into separate files, it …
The electrical team has hit the ground running this semester! We started with wrapping up some of the projects from last year. The serial thruster code is finally working. After connecting a separate Arduino Mega directly to the ESCs, we realized the issue was either the thruster Arduino, PWM driver, or connections between the two. …
Within these past few weeks, our current projects have reached major milestones with their progress! For the groups who’ve been modeling our electrical stacks on wood boards, the big stack team has entirely finished the battery connectors, kill switches, motor control/ESC, and started to add in sensors. The mini stack team has not only finished …
We had our first pool test of the year! New members got to see the robot in the water for the first time (they even got to see some barrel rolls). Of course, this pool test was not without some drama. The power cable from the battery capsule to the main stack, through a combination …
With the school year starting back up, we decided to continue the electrical team’s onboarding project from the previous year and augment it with a new challenge. This year, our challenge for the teams was to create either the loudest sound or have the most creative use of sound using piezoelectric speakers. With roughly 30 …
On the first day of March, water leaked into the robot and destroyed many components. We spent a lot of time after this resoldering and re-epoxying different parts of the robot. We also ruggedized the electrical ports in order to prevent future leakages. This is when we decided to implement the temperature and humidity sensor. …
The CS team is quite self-sufficient when it comes to running pool tests. New to this semester, we’ve greatly increased the number of pool tests we’re running. Our goal is three per week: Friday morning, Saturday, and Sunday. So, it was not great news to get a (literal) wakeup call on a Friday morning. As …
One issue we faced often last semester was that the ports for the ethernet cable we used for our tether were corroding. Additionally, we used a PoE switch to power the cameras on the robot, but this would get very hot very fast, so we wanted to switch to another method to power the cameras. …
Our robot uses three different sensors to keep an eye on its internal and external climate and other factors. The first sensor we use is the voltage sensor. This sensor constantly prints the onboard voltage of the robot. This sensor is connected to the same arduino as the pressure sensor. We use the pressure sensor …
In robotics, the dance of problem-solving takes on a rhythm akin to a complex symphony, where each instrument must perform in perfect harmony. This past year, I had the privilege of orchestrating a project that sought to interpret acoustics using a robotic system equipped with hydrophones. Our goal was simple: develop a method for accurately …
At the beginning of the year, recruiting is very important for Duke Robotics. In years past, our introductory meetings have entailed an onboarding process to introduce students to their respective subteams. For electrical, we’ve always been combined with the CS subteam on an introduction to ROS with Turtlesim. While important to electrical, we decided to …
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