This week consisted of a few different projects inluding the mandated Sumo Robot project for my Robotics & Engineering. I have been neglecting to work on it for a while now, and have mainly been focusing on preparing the robotics team for the competition on May 3rd. Luckily, my peers have been aiding me in the design and manufacturing process of the Sumo Robot, so I helped out by soldering the PCB Andrew Huang designed

Introduction Today, I will walk you through the creation of a cable for your Anytone AT778 or Retevis RT95 ham radio, enabling you to both send and receive digital modes. This post is very similar to my old one, where I made a digital audio cable for the Baofeng UV5R. Check that out if you have a UV5R. If you want custom cable instructions, feel free to ask. This cable will allow you to both RX and TX any digital mode from your laptop, including (but not limited to)…

This week, I made a major software breakthrough on the ROV. The IMU will periodically return invalid data, likely due to a faulty sensor. Due to the lack of error handling in the code, the ROV would receive a null value and the enire software system responsible for the control of the ROV would crash and need to be restarted. This bug that I’ve been tracking for nearly a month now was resolved by simply implenting some basic catches to detect when these null bits come in, and simply ignore them.

This week, Tim finished his electronics skeleton that he has been working on for the past few weeks. It looks very nice and is completely custom designed, machined, and resin printed. I helped him install it into the ROV, and I can already tell that it will make things significantly easier in terms of debugging and also performance of the overall machine. The previous layout consisted of floppy acrylic fingers that held the PCBs in place.

Over the weekend, two of my friends and I went out foxhunting. On the groups.io page, we found a few local foxes that had been set up. We took the opportunity to drive 30 minutes North to see what we could find! Since we all got our radio licenses around the same time, we all purchased the same, budget-friendly HT: the Baofeng UV-5R. We brought along for with us for the endeavor, and an assortment of various antennas- from long whips to little stubbies.

The first 2 days of shop this week were spent replacing XT30 connectors on the ROV’s power distribution board. There have been connection issues in the past, and I really didn’t want this to factor into existing reliability issues. On Wednesday, Jonas Wirz and I got the ROV into the pool, however, we had some free time before then and were very productive with it. Short-lived gated off area exploration (right).

When I bought an upgrade from my baofeng UV5R (ANYTONE AT-778UV), I figured a new antenna set-up was in store. My base station antenna is a Diamond X50, attached to a custom mast. This setup was a heck of a lot better than the rubber duck on my handheld, but because it was only about 8ft. from the ground, the environment and houses nearby would block both TX and RX signals significantly.

This week I locked in and spent a good chunk of time identifying the reasoning behind the mysterious crashing phenomenon we have been experiencing for over a year and a half in the ROV. Raspberry Pi 5 Problems In the past, the main control computer (RPi 5) was experiencing power interruption issues due to the massive current draw of the 8 thrusters. Because of the low dropout voltage in the 5 volt regulator, we found that adding some capacitange along these output lines helped smooth out any wild ripples.

This week was a bit funky. Not only did I have limited time in shop, but limited time in school overall! Our school had a half-day on Wednesday (we get released at noon) and the day after was a snow day. Because of these two things, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to work on roboticy things. This is enough to call a snow day?! Nonetheless, my friends and I ended up getting some work done on the ROV on the days we did have.

This week consisted of a combination of activities both during shop-time and during robotics club. I spent the majority of my shop time helping my classmates with their light boxes. This included anything from crimping connectors to soldering small parts onto PCBs. I also spent some time optimizing the ROV in terms of performance and reliability, which included setting up a systemd service to automatically start the main ROV software.