Drones and ROVs and Arduinos
A journey building drones and ROVs and other open hardware and Arduino based stuff
Making sense out of the ArduSwimmer cape
The architecture of the control unit of OpenROV is pretty simple:
- The BeagleBone card hosts a webserver running a Node.js application
- The browser interacts with node.js app to watch the video feed and to control the ROV
- The Node.js app talks to an Arduino to drive motors and in the future reading sensor’s values.
But a standard Arduino is too big to fit, doesn’t have the connectors for the BeagleBone, so what they built is a BeagleBone cape, with on top an ATMega 328, some power circuitry both for the ATMega and the BeagleBone, the filtered and protect connection to the BeagleBone’s pins and finally the output pins for the motors and servos and AUX output (Leds)
The schematic is a bit difficult to read (maybe just for me because I don’t have a lot of knowledge in electronics) and even more difficult is the board layout. But with a bit of time I got to understand everything and made a list of the components needed to build the cape.
Over the weekend I’ll try getting assembling the components on a solderless breadboard before trying my luck at building it on a protoboard.
