USV Water Test    Dylan Haley Entry #4

This week we took our USV on its first water test. Our aim of this initial test was to test the following:

  • Safety Override Manual Drive - Test the control of the USV using the radio RC transmitter
  • Microbit Manual Drive - Test the control of the USV using microbits
  • Ubidots Cloud Analog Inputs - Test analog inputs back from USV xina box microbit ecosystem to Ubidots Cloud
Overall our first water test was very successful and I am very happy with the progress we as a team have made. It was great to finally see the USV we have all been working so hard actually float and drive in the water. There are a few small issues that we have discovered and we can spend time fixing these for the next water test.

Both the safety override manual drive test and the microbit manual drive were a success. However, there is a slight issue with our motors as our current design had negative effects when reversing. The motors are currently operating between 40%-50% which was sufficient enough for the first test as conditions were calm. In the future it will be interesting to see how the USV moves with more power. 

We were unable to properly test out Tello drone as its flight was unstable and we risked losing it in the water. We also were not able to test our autopilot feature using ardupilot as we are waiting on hardware to arrive in order to implement this.  

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