Tuesday, May 3, 2016

The W.A.S.P - Details

I haven't made any changes to the unit over the winter since I got a new Lowrance Elite 7 Ti which has Structure Scan (AKA sidescan) so I don't know yet how much I am still going to need this for depth sounding in the flooded trees out at Lost Grove Lake (I have some new maps I'll be posting soon on my other blog) So I'll just document what I have already which works well as is.

The main drive for the unit are standard RC/Drone parts. The motors are A2212-13T 1000KV Outrunner Brushless Motors driven by a pair of 30 Amp brushless DC speed controllers. These are connected to a standard 2.4 GHz RC receiver which is controlled by a standard RC dual joystick controller used for planes and drones. These are powered by a pair of 11.1 V 2200 mAH lithium batteries in parallel. (Not shown )






Mounted in the round enclosure mounted on the stand in the back is a GPS receiver. Just below it is a bluetooth radio to send data back to my boat's computer or a tablet. 



Mounted on the front is an Garmin Smart Transducer  which outputs serial NMEA depth, speed and temperature which along with the GPS NMEA position data is sent to an Arduino Mega microcontroller with micro SD shield running the same NMEA multiplexer/logging program as the unit I detailed last year. The depth data is sent to one UART the data from the GPS is sent to a second, the main UART sends the combined data out the USB for debugging and the 4th UART outputs the combined data to the SD card and the Bluetooth radio. I log the Depth and Position to the SD card and send Depth Temperature and Position data back to the boat via the Bluetooth link.




Next up will be a short review of the Lowrance Elite 7 Ti and a couple of additions I made to improve the versatility of the unit.


2 comments:

Unknown said...

What about costs of this project?

Long John said...

The basic robot was around $100 USD and the smart transducer was another $100. Of course you need a 3D printer to make the basic frame which is largely based on this Thingiverse design

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:470370 JALC Boat .....