Today's the day!If you don't remember the Betsy Smith from last year, here is a reminder. In our family, the tradition is to bring each kid once they are 13-14 to the world-famous Beaver Island in Lake Michigan. And after five attempts from five different children, we failed to find the 149-year-old Betsy Smith that sunk in Little Iron Ore Bay off the south end of the island. But as i said, today's the day. The best way to explain it all is in video. The first video is shipwreck footage shot from the bottom of the Sea Lemon autonomous boat as it heads into the deep water. The waves were very rough and the sediment was stirred into the water making it cloudy, although it got clearer as it got further from shore. We had to overcome some unforeseen adversities as explained in the second video. We finally found the Betsy! Unfortunately we did not see it in person but we at least were able to see it through a video. We were honestly so amazed the Sea Lemon came back through such rough seas. We think we may want to add a keel or even make our own boat to overcome waves, but that is all for the future.
Beaver island is a great place and I strongly recommend you come out here and rent a Geo Tracker!
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We're back for another post! Remember how we mounted the SQ18 camera to the boat on the recent Belleville lake run? Well our idea was to position the camera to look underwater at the Betsy Smith. We had three ideas:
We chose the 2nd option because it was easy to make. Obviously the 1st option would be cool and stable but we thought it would be hard to make since we would need to make sure it stayed upright using weights and ballasts. The 3rd option would be really nice for solar panels in the future. Heres how the 2nd option turned out: As you can see, we left a bit of metal sticking out for if we want to use a trailer. So we are here at the Beave and we wanted to test it out before we send it to the Betsy Smith. We decided to pick a route that avoided weeds but goes around the harbor in an interesting path We launched the boat and watched it slowly make its way to the other end of the harbor for a while, but then we had to move fast. You see, when we go to Beaver Island we only bring bikes, and we had to make it around to the public beach before the boat did. While we were pedaling, we thought we saw the boat off in the distance. But when we got to the beach, it was no where to be seen. My dad had to go get the binoculars to try and spot the boat. After a few minutes of panicking, my dad came back and we spotted the boat. It was hard to see but it was coming towards us. It barely missed some reeds sticking out of the water but it ended up coming towards us. But there was a problem. There are buoys that line the public beach with one end open for kayaks. We were headed straight for the rope that marked the end of the beach. The boat got caught up on the rope and got stuck. We were pondering what to do since we were both in clothes. My dad ended up having to walk into the water all the way to the boat. The water ended up getting a little below his shoulders but he ended up getting the boat out of the water. We recovered the boat and looked at the data. We got amazing camera footage but we only got 3/4 of the footage. We think maybe the drive formatting wasn't good. Anyway, here is the footage that actually looked good. Be sure to turn down the volume on your computer. The reason i say GOOD footage is because most of it was really deep. If you look on google maps you can see that the water goes from 3 ft down to 51 feet relatively quickly.
We will post again soon once we take a run at the Betsy Smith. Stay tuned! Ezra and my Dad are currently at Beaver Island, which is the same island I visited last year, so I (Malachi) am the only one making this post. That means ZERO restrictions! Ha! Just kidding. So the main reason we haven't exactly posted, is because there hasn't been any serious progress done on the boat. We had an error with the throttle, as well as the steering, and ninety percent of that is just trouble shooting. For some reason, the prior programs are not working. We think the water that damaged the arduino and forced us to make a new computer also might have damaged either the motor or the ESC (Electronic Speed COntrol). If the throttle setting is less than 90 or so, the prop does not spin. Remember the throttle setting goes from 0 -180, like a servo from 0 degrees to 180 degrees. HOWEVER, we did manage to get the boat working again. We modified the program when it wakes up and does a prop test to spin at much higher speeds and then never set throttle below 90. If it does, the motor will not spin again until we reboot. Not only did we get the program working again we added new features. Instead of turning the prop off after the prop test, we start looking at GPS HDOP (Horizontal Degree of Precision) which is a measure of GPS accuracy, and when we get a GPS lock and HDOP is <600, we spin up the prop for 3 seconds so we know we have a lock. Then we don't put the boat in the water without a lock and have it drive in circles, or worse yet, drive off. We don't know why the throttle has to be higher than 90. We tried recalibrating the ESC but nothing works. Still, for finding the Betsy Smith we have a working boat. We also didn't want our arduino to get water damaged in future, even though all the chips are now socketed for easy replacement. Ezra taped a ziploc bag in the roof of the boat, so the arduino has a dry location. To test it all, we sent the boat on a test route around an island at a local lake. For this test we added a 1080P camera. It's a cool little camera off ebay called a SQ18. My Dad loves it because it only cost him 20 bucks. My older brother Noah, who is always looking for an excuse to fly his drone, took some great footage. Here is a video of it: Here is the route we used. It took about 20 minutes to complete... Or so I remember? The speed data from GPS showed around 5 mph at the start and dropping to close to 4mph. On return, the battery was about 40% capacity. Expect an update from beaver island soon. My brother is attempting to find the Betsy Smith, which in the case you don't remember what that is from last year, it is simply a sunken ship that we attempt to find every time a new kid goes to the island.
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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
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