We are finally back and we have been working behind the scenes, even if it is just to get back to where we were. If you couldn't realize, this is Ezra writing and like every kid in my family i am going to beaver island this year! That means i am the last of six in my family to search once again for the Betsy Smith which also means we are probably going to work really hard this year to find it. Anyway, let me fill you in. The bad news is that we had to remake the boat computer. The good news is that it is socketed to make sure we don't have to do it again! Here is the story. One month ago we thought maybe we should work on the boat again, but unfortunately figured out that all four of the major arduino functions didn't work: rudder, prop, navigation, and SD card storage. But thankfully that is all fixed now! We bought cheap Chinese arduino nanos but Unfortunately we could not upload anything! We looked up some of the issues other people were having and none of the solutions worked. We tried the new bootloader, the old one, different programmers, different ports, boards, ETC. We ended up trying to burn a bootloader but even that didn't work. We even tried getting a legit arduino nano. Until finally, we realized that two strips of wire were connected to eachother. This was a huge relief because that particular issue took a long time and our motivation levels plummeted causing us to rarely work on it. This fixed the problem but we had to socket it which required a whole new rebuild, which you can see below. This is our current state. We have a completely functioning arduino now. We tested it the day of writing this and all four functions worked. We ran it and the SD card initialized. We instantly received NMEA (GPS language) sentences. The only problem is that we didn't get coordinates even after a few minutes of waiting, although once we took it outside it started to get a lock and everything worked fine. Once we mounted it on the boat and plugged it in, the rudder and prop also worked.
I think that the next step is to test it then "solarize" it but the main goal this year is to get it to the Betsy Smith.
0 Comments
|
AuthorMalachi and Ezra's page where we build cool stuff and either break it, set fire to it, etc. in the name of science. Archives
August 2019
Categories
All
|