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I'm looking for some sort of sonar/radio
transparent material I can use for my transducer housing. At the moment I'm
fooling around with some cheap hobby-store rsonar appMods for educational
robotics, and pretty much every single thing I try completley negates the
sonar.
I've even tried mounting it on a piece of
teflon sheeting and it still seemed to "muffle" it.
The option of canabalizing a fish finder as a sonar
system like was done for Archimedes is unfortunatley not an option. This system
is far too small to support the weight.
As for an update, now that I've gotten back into
things since my work schedule cooled down some.
1. BugEye is at the bottom of the pond, I got the
tether tangled in something and was stupid enought to pull until I got only the
tether back. Much Colorful language ensued.
2. Archimedes is slowly shaping up... but
everything is so expensive for that scale that I do one thing at a
time.
3. BugEye II is in the works, I'm hoping to make it
smaller and add two new sensors 1. A sonar system (Not severely powerful, but
good enough for 2 meter view ahead in zero visibility conditions) 2. an
extendable probe w/ one of those "screw picker upper" gripping hands at the tip.
BugEye II is designed to be smaller than the original BugEye, I thought of
outfitting BugEye II with some sort of radio control... like maybe WiFi control
(I saw a neat little appmod that can be used for this) or some other type of
radio control, but I'm uncertain about the reliabilty of transmitting through
water at anything beyond the most minor of depths.
Design Flaws Found With BugEye (For anyone else
that wants to learn from its demise)
1. Teflon is a wonderful building material, but
it's not good for mounting things onto, you need to find things to anchor to.
It's kind of like putting a screw in drywall without hitting a
stud.
2. I didn't take into account the length of my
tether, if you're tether is over 100` you need to design for the reduced power
you'll get through the lines.. ESPECIALLY when your working with such low power
equipment that goes into robotics to begin with.
3. I just screwed my teather into the coax plug and
the power cord was snapped in, next time I'll put an eye hook on or something so
I can hook it up to that before I plug it in.
And that is my question and progress update for the
day.
George H. Slaterpryce
III
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