Hi everybody!
I thought as we get later into the year, I might provide an update on our progress related to undersea rovers and using them for data collection.
I had a bit of a delay (I’m also working on refurbishing our student observatory, and that needed some attention for awhile), but I’m back at our rover project again.
A quick review, we’ve built one rover so far, a very basic model, all manual control with no sensors on board. Althought really simple, there were a lot of good learnings there related to orientation of thrusters, buoyancy, etc etc etc, things that I’m sure that you guys are all familiar with.
Our next rover continues our learning on submersible operations as we expand into computer interfacing. I talked about this at some length in my earlier email, but I’ve got a bit more detail for you now, which you may or may not find interesting. 
While our first submersible was more of a frame with things added to it (PVC pipe, primarily), the next version is primarily 3D printed components. The electronics live in an acrylic tube pressure vessel that is supposed to work down to about 100 meters. There will be 5 thrusters, 2 lights, a camera, and a pressure sensor. I’m going to do some research in the Bristlemouth doc to see how we might relay that data using Bristlemouth, but since I don’t have a developer’s kit, we have to find a different way to manage things for now (hope springs eternal that we’ll be grated a kit one day, but I understand that we’re not exactly on the main developer path right now). And so, we’re going to be using an open source system called PixHawk to manage the components. PixHawk is mostly used for controlling flying drones, from what I understand, but it’s been modified in this project to control the submersible. Pixhawk might be thought of as the reverse image of Bristlemouth right now. Pixhawk, good a operating components, not so good at transmitting data, Bristlemouth, good at transmitting data, not so good at operating components. I think that Bristlemouth is the ecosystem that I’d prefer for us to be in, but in the meantime, I still want to be able to build things with our students that can move their learning forward. Because these submersibles aren’t that expensive to build, what I would LOVE to do is build 2 of them, implementing PixHawk in one, and implementing Bristlemouth in the other. I think that that would be a really interesting experiment and learning tool. Maybe Santa will drop a developer’s kit under my Christmas tree.
So, as of today, I’ve got orders out for the electronics (Amazon, Alibaba and Adafruit are my best buddies) and the Pixhawk components and putting together a new 3D printer for printing out the parts. We’ve got 3D printers on campus but sometimes its faster for me to just put things together in my workshop at home.
I also signed up for the Bristlemouth conference. I don’t have a budget to come out there (I could burn some frequent flyer miles but the school isn’t going to pay for a hotel) but I’ll be lurking around online.
That’s about it. I’ll send some pics as we start the next build, but until then I hope that everyone has a happy holiday season.
Ron