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interior design – top lighting

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After some behind-the-scenes testing of prototypes, we decided to add a ring of LED lights around the top of the device to allow for easier debugging and testing by the user when problems eventually come up.

Previously, we found difficulty finding out the problems unless directly connected to the Arduino and reading off from the console. When testing the device on-site, we cannot ensure the device is appropriately working without checking the cloud server.

With the installation of the LED, it allows for easier checking of the device when doing long-term testing. If there is any error in the program bootup, the LED will turn red signaling something is wrong. This can help us, while testing, to see if any connections are missing or if the code is wrong. The LED also shows progress of the code being processed. Colorful lights mean the boot up is successful.

The LED will shine a solid ring of light that shows the progress of taking data samples and transferring it

interior design – circuit design

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After we were done with the main body, we moved on to tackle the main code of the device. To get a better picture of how we wanted the circuitry to look like, we first drew a general sense of the circuitry  (as shown below). We then went ahead with the coding.

After much testing, everything was finally running smoothly and we designed two PCBs and printed it to fit everything in our body. One of the PCB works to connect the arduino and the sensors, and the other is to connect it to the antennae for the communications system.

interior designing – overview

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We catered more than a week’s worth of time to this stage of our designing as we wanted all the pieces to be snuggly fit. This is to prevent any damage to the fragile sensor due to abrupt motion.

Due to our poor time estimation, we may have ordered the electronic parts a little too late, so all the design work had to be done without the exact measurements of the parts any than those that were provided on the pages that we ordered them from. So…fingers crossed and let’s hope that everything fits right.

Our contingency plan, for if the compartments are too tight, is to use a soldering iron to hopefully be able to heat up the acrylic enough to compress the sides enough to fit the parts in. If the compartments turn out too large, we will just have to glue (one that is aqua-friendly) the parts to the compartments.

I will be breaking down the individual interior parts in more detail in the next few posts. For now, enjoy the curated gallery!

main compartment
circuit design

 

 

 

third (and hopefully, final) prototype

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We have finally settled on a shape to maintain buoyancy, portability and modularity. Through our knowledge from past modules and observations, we tried to keep the centre of gravity underneath the centre of buoyancy to keep the object unconditionally stable. We will place most of the heavy components like the battery and sensors near the bottom to achieve this.

We will be using the color yellow as it symbolizes special markings at sea.

second prototype

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From our first prototype, we improved our device with the goal of making it more modular and serviceable. We approached it by breaking up the main compartment of the buoy into different components, thereby it more accessible. This can be seen in the picture on the right where each section has its own functionality.

We keep the general shape of the device similar to our first prototype since it was able to stay buoyant. We added a protective barrier at the bottom to keep the sensors safe from any nibbling by the fishes.

first prototype

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Our general idea for our first design is to keep it simple. We needed something that was able to tackle our main issue which will be the buoyancy and stability of the whole buoy. On top of that, a large enough component that is able to hold our sensors and devices that we want to be deployed in the tank. While doing so, we needed to keep in mind to keep its footprint compact since we were told that every volume is valuable to industry companies.

We did some sketching and this was what we had came up with. Our very first iteration that is able to tick our checklist. We have designed a case (as seen in the left photo) that is able to house all of our components snuggly, in a space as compact as possibly.

After running the case in a SOLIDWORKS stimulation, we found that it was far from buoyant and decided to add a ring to rectify this.

This resulted in the finalized first design as seen in the pictures on the right.