Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Bout Time

Well...we finally got this robot working.
I can't quit you


If I had known...if we had known...before starting, how many difficulties we'd have in just the building  of the robot, we'd have been stunned.  The OpenROV team had me hooked way back when, with their kit that "can be built in a weekend."  Here we are a year later, finally getting to that point.  There have been a lot of lessons learned in this endeavor and I won't detail all of them here, since we've been covering them throughout the course of the blog, but a few things are worth touching on:

  • Hobbywing ESC's are a pain in the arse
  • Danny E likes to cut, burn, and hammer on things
    • But he makes them work
  • Piloting a robot in the real world is NOT just like a videogame
  • Building robots is even more fun than you'd think, when all is said and done

We navigated a little homebrew obstacle course in the pool to do some pilot testing and get a feel for how the OpenROV will handle in tight spaces.  It's a little scary how tough it can be to pilot in the pool; some of that is due to the currents being pumped around, and the relative lightness of the ROV.  But it's also just tougher than it looks.  We bonked the GoPro on the obstacle course more than once, and sometimes even getting our bearings straight was a hassle.  But we we able to fit the ROV through some tight spaces and we think we're ready to do this.

Next step is to make this official with the Jacob's Well people; we are hard at work on securing a date and time to take this little guy out there and see what we can see.  It's finally coming together!