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Electrical Engineer and Computer Programmer for hire in Victoria, BC, Canada | ||||
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AUV Sonar BoardBuilt: 2004/08/XX Added to Webpage: 2010/08/22 I used to be a member of the University of Victoria Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Team. We competed in a competition in San Diego every August, where the AUV had to perform an underwater mission using its own sensors without any human or external computer communication. The competition was scheduled over our summer semester's final exam period, so we had to take most of our final exams during our last week of classes, drive down to the competition site in San Diego, do the competition, then race back to finish our last final exams. During this hectic time, the AUV was rarely in its finished state when we arrived in San Diego, so we spent all of our time at the competition site and in our hotel rooms working hard to finish off the AUV. In this particular year, I laid out the circuit board design of the Sonar Board on my laptop, sitting in the back of the car during our 30-hour drive to San Diego. I printed the board layout onto a transparency and used sunlight to transfer the image to a photosensitive copper board. I etched the circuit board in the hotel bathroom, and drilled, populated, and soldered the board in the hotel. All the hardware was done and the software was mostly written, but then it was determined that the steering by compass algorithm wasn't working, so fixing the steering algorithm became my top priority, and in the end there wasn't enough time to finalize the sonar system. I ended up picking the AUV sonar system as the topic of an engineering work term report. Click here to read the report in .PDF format. |