USV Water Test 1 - Kevin #7

Introduction

This week we did our first Water test for the USV, it was a great success. It was very nice to see nearly the whole team together to work on the USV and test all the various different aspects of the project and see it coming together.

Arrival

We all travelled down to Killurin Bridge down in Wexford to a nice area to test out the USV. I attached some photos of the area below. The plan was to arrive at 10pm and leave at about 2am, giving us plenty of time to set everything up and account for any potential delays.



Once we got to the destination, we started unloading all the equipment to do some final building of the USV and get it ready to go into the water. Our project lead went off to get the Safety boat and while he was gone we split into our different teams to prepare everything.

Preparation

I was part of the team responsible for the Cloud tests and making sure Ubidots worked as expected. The first thing we had a look at was the GPS on the Microbit, as usual it was taking a very long time to pick up our location. We had to move location a few times until eventually my teammate got the GPS to work when resting the Microbit on top of one of the cars that we had with us. I then moved onto getting the motor and Ubidots connection working again to see if we could do that test with the boat motors. 


After a lot of trial and error we got the small motor moving again, we switched it over to the USV motors and were ready to go with the cloud tests. I then went around to the other teams to help them set up all their parts of the project, the team building the USV and attaching the motors ran into a few issue's and needed a hand to help fix them.


Safety and Tests

A major aspect of these tests was safety, when our project lead got back with the safety boat we helped get that in the Water. Everything was running smoothly, until, the car nearly ended up in the river and we had to spend some time securing that and towing it off the ramp. It was quite worrying to see but everything worked out in the end.


After these delays, it was finally time to start doing the tests of the USV. We did three main tests of the boat, firstly we got it into the water and ran the test to make sure the USV could drive on the water, we used a controller and made sure the USV could move forward, backwards and turn left and right. It was a massive success, the USV was moving!


Next up, we switched to using the Microbits to control the USV, we tried manually controlling the USV using the two Microbits. We went through various different motions for the USV. This also worked successfully and the day was going amazingly.


Lastly, we tried adding the cloud code to the USV and testing the motors from Ubidots, unfortunately this didn't work as we believe it was a range or communication issue involved with sending the data between the two Microbits, and the motors on the USV would not move when directed from the cloud platform. 

Summary

Moving forward, we can now start looking at fixing the Ubidots errors, and then doing path planning, image and camera detection. I'm looking forward to continuing working on the project with the rest of the team, these tests were great to see and increased the teams motivation overall to continue working on the project.

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