First USV Test - Erinn #7

On Friday the 18th of March, as a group, we travelled to Killurin Bridge, County Wexford, for our first USV water trial. We left Waterford at 9am and arrived around 10am, giving us plenty of time to set up before flood tide.

The aim of this trial was to test a number of controls including;

  • Manual Drive (Safety Override Test)
  • Microbit Drive
  • Cloud Drive via Ubidots (analogue input monitoring)
Once our team lead, Jason, arrived with the USV, we unloaded his car and began setting up. 

We separated into our separate teams. As I was part of the Cloud team, I powered up my MicroBit and connected it to my mobile hotspot. It took several minutes for the XinaBox GSP to find our location, but it soon began sending values to Ubidots. 

We waited for Jason to launch his safety boat before we put the USV in the water. One of the electronic students, Patryck, accompanied Jason in the safety boat, bringing with him the physical controller for the USV. The physical controller acts as a safety measure, having an overdrive option when using MicroBit control or cloud control. We pushed the USV into the water and powered it on. From there, Patryck was able to drive the USV away from the shore. Controlling the USV took some time as the controllers were assigned oppositely by mistake. For this initial test, the USV is only assigned 40% power to the thrusters.


After we were happy with the movement of the USV using the controller, we switched to using MicroBit control. In order to do this, Patryck had to change the switch on his controller to allow the MicroBit to take over. Adam joined Jason and Patryck in the safety boat and brought his left and right MicroBit controls. The USV was successfully driven using the MicroBit controllers by Adam. We also tried adding the cloud code to the USV and testing the motors from Ubidots but unfortunately, it didn't work. We believe there may have been range communication issues.

The day was a success! We were all incredibly happy with the movement of the USV and how the whole team came together to make it work.

My next step in my cloud development is to read actual current and voltage values from the MicroBit on the USV to my XinaBox MicroBit and on to Ubidots, where the values can be monitored. In order to do this, I have to wait for the electronic students to change the circuit








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