DIY Robot-boat at AUVSI’s Autonomous Surface Vehicle Competition 2009

So the major project that I have been involved in recently was working on an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) that was entered in AUVSI’s 2009 ASV competition. Given a small team (6 people, 2 builders), under $1000, and about 30 days we built what would be considered a feat of bodging and hacks based on extreme ingenuity and resourcefulness.

Note that of the four people in the photo above, it consists of (from left to right) a comp sci masters student on exchange, a political science student, a broadcast technician, and a chemistry/biology student.

On the road – aonomus rocks Virginia Beach

So I promised that I’d have something cool coming up, the major ‘secret’ project I’ve been working on is an Autonomous Surface Vehicle entered into a AUVSI competition. While I will eventually do a full writeup with pictures and descriptions of various hacks that we have done, and the general construction of the boat, however I’m to tied up with actually helping the team with getting the project complete and working for the competition.

The competition itself is held at Virginia Beach, at the Founders Inn hotel under the Association for Unmanned Vehicles Systems International. Starting on July 19th onwards, each night at 10pm the officials have said that a ‘recap’ video will be posted. As well, at some point there will be a live webcast set up… more details as they come.

In other news, I have finally popped my ham radio cherry while on this road trip. My friend had his FT-897 set up in the roadtripmobile with a 2m magmount antenna ontop of the van, I managed to make my first contacts as a ham on repeaters on the way down towards VA beach. Since his radio and mine (FT-857) are fairly similar with the multifunction display driven controls, it wasn’t terribly hard to make contacts, unfortunately there were issues with the power wiring to the radio, so my apologies to anyone that was speaking with me and got cut off.

To tide y’all over, pics are available here: http://s139.photobucket.com/albums/q297/aonomus/ASV/

Quick and Dirty Timelapse Photography

So as I prep for a roadtrip, the thought of timelapse occured to me. I have already made some random timelapse test videos using my old Canon Powershot A40 and the software that came with it, however portability was always an issue.

Today, that is no longer an issue, I built in a few hours a frame to hold my old camera and a servo motor, and controlled the entire setup using a Arduino. The setup includes a LCD for display purposes, but in general is meant to quickly satisfy the need to do timelapse for the roadtrip drive. I plan to improve this a little bit, perhaps add a LM317 vreg so the entire setup is self-contained and powered off a 12V wall-wart or battery pack, however time is at a premium.