Starting Tomorrow!

So tomorrow I officially switch over to half-time employment at my regular day job (software developer at Measurand Inc, www.measurand.com) and dedicate the other half of my day to development work on AMOS. The plan is to spend mornings at home, and afternoons at Measurand, but that may get changed around some, depending on what is going on. It's going to be a little bit weird at first I think, but I'm used to doing after-hours contract work and personal projects at home, so probably not that weird. The money thing could result in some stress after a while, we will see. I canceled my bi-weekly RRSP contributions so that will improve the cash flow situation a bit, plus I'm still doing a bit of after-hours contracting work, so hopefully the savings won't suffer too much.

Some more money was spent on parts last week, with the following things ordered:

1. ebay:
12v  10 Amp-hour Dakota Lithium LiFePO4 Battery  ($99 + $30 shipping)  BlueROV (see below) powers an entire ROV with 6 thrusters off of a battery that is only slightly bigger than this, so I'm hoping this one should be sufficient for AMOS, which will only have two thrusters.

2. Amazon:

ALLPOWERS 100W 18V 12V Flexible Solar Panel  ($215 Cdn.) It's supposed to be suitable for RVs and boats.

ALLPOWERS 20A Solar Charge Controller Solar Panel Battery Intelligent Regulator with USB Port Display 12V/24V  ($26 Cdn.)

3. BlueRobotics:

Two T200 thrusters (and two speed controllers) ($388):

Plus an SOS leak sensor ($29), a potting kit ($10), three 6 mm cable penetrators ($10) and three 8 mm cable penetrators ($13). Plus $27 shipping.

So something on the order of about $1000 in parts this week. This gets most of the big expenses out of the way though I think, at least as far as AMOS is concerned. I expect I'll need to spend a bit more than $2K once it comes time to do some fluorescent microscopy...