Working on construction...

HC Design Complete

The HC design has been finished. Check out the SolidWorks picture!

Boat network is up

The internal network on the boat now has basic functionality, and all 3 PICs are on it. We pass messages around via SPI on our internal network. This adds to our current ability to talk to external sensors and radios over UART, and some basic SPI we had working for the last checkoff.

Electrical Design of DHC is Complete...

Today I thought through and finished designing (at least for a first generation) the Electrical design for the DHC. It is based on the previous sketches I had made with 3 PIC16F690s for control of the boat. See the schematics below and let me know what comments you have. Thanks!

--Ryan

PWM, Timer, Servo

A timer subsystem was created for the PIC. It activates Timers 0 and 1, with interrupts occurring on overflows on both. The timer module contains a function, using timer 1, which can retrieve the current system time in milliseconds. Timer 0 is used with a PWM module. Overflows on this timer increment a count inside the PWM module every 200 microseconds. This count is used to raise lines high and low, depending on the value of the count and the desired frequency and duty cycle of the PWM output. This PWM output is used to drive a servo, which will be used to display the crab count on the boat.

Got the Radios Chirping!

Over the course of the weekend I was able to get the XBEE radios communicating successfully bidirectionally, one on the PIC and one on the E128. Below is a picture of the setup for the HC, which it's LCD and Force Sensitive Resistor and Photocell and radio. And there is also a picture of the DCH's radio connected to a PIC, compiled in C.

Peter got the LCD working!

Peter did a great job writing the software and integrating the hardware for the LCD! You can see it below, and how it will show the crab pot ID's and accumulation rates for all 12 crab pots!

RFID reader works

We can now scan RFID cards and read the numbers off of them.

Design of Temporary system to get the boat moving...

Here is my plan for the barebones electronics to get the boat moving with a tether tomorrow. Let me know what you think about it. I'm just planning on using the joystick as an input to the E128, which will drive the motors through the TLE5206's, all off of one NiCad battery.

Pictures!

Preliminary Communications Diagram