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.

This week, I worked on the ROV for the robotics team as I had already completed the lightbox project as shown in the previous post. The robot has been experiencing some reliability issues, and they have something to do with the Raspberry Pi 5 we have onboard. The Pi would suddenly “crash” (meaning a loss of connection over ssh; ethernet port lights turned off; only red power light was illuminated) without warning.

I have had this cheap 12V switching power supply that (claims) to be able to deliver 30 amps. It is a common power supply type, and are commonly used in consumer applications, especially in the LED lighting industry. In fact, the exact same model can be found mounted on my Creality Ender 3 3D printer. Background Personally, I find these power supplies perfect for many use cases, especially when one considers their pricepoint.

The lightbox has been finished! I designed the acrylic and manufactured it on our laser engraver/cutter. The end result was better than expected, although I had to condense (shorten) the acrylic overall to meet the max acrylic dimensions of 70 square cm. After the transparent acrylic was finished, I screwed it into the lightbox and “force fit” everything together as designed. Luckily my tolerances and dimensions matched perfectly. The acrylic had to be custom designed to fit the screw holes and the box geometry.

While in robotics this week, I continued my work on the lightbox project. This week involved a lot of CAD and 3D printing for me, and ended up taking a bit more time than expected. Generally speaking, I am ahead of schedule so I don’t have to worry too much. The light box is composed of two main parts that get 3D printed and screwed together. There is the base which is the outer shell and holds the button and power jack.

SSH is awesome, but your options when trying to run a GUI application are a bit limited, especially on headless computers. Luckily there are a few ways to go about handling this problem, even if your computer has no monitor directly connected to it. SSH into the machine First of all, you need to ssh into your machine to get everything set up. Now you have a couple options. Some people may have a display (be it a full monitor, a TV screen, a touch display, etc) and others may have nothing it all.

Paper bags are great. They are much more sustainable than their plastic counterparts and they are reusable and recyclable. I often keep or collect these bags because they have so many uses. The issue I have is that I don’t have a good place to put them. At the moment, they are stored behind my recycling bin, being propped up. When I take out the recycling they all fall down and make a mess.

During my time in the Robotics Shop 5th and 6th period this week, I made significant headway on the lightbox project. For my lightbox, I will be making a transparent “EXIT” sign that you frequently see in modern office buildings. These signs are very expensive and can be found online for hundreds of dollars. My plan is to make it for much less. The most expensive component to the project would be the acrylic, which can be found for about 10 dollars for an appropriate size.

With my new HAM radio license in the books, I bought the Baofeng UV5R as my first HT. Between its low-cost and various features, I think its been a great radio to start out with. With an upgraded antenna (almost not optional) and a larger battery bank, I’ve found the radio to be a pretty solid unit. Unfortunately, there is no direct way to plug in the radio’s speaker and mic jacks to a computer soundcard to transmit and receive sounds to and from my PC, but with a simple cable modification, this can be done.