Building AMOS 4.0

The past couple of weeks have been spent putting stuff together for the next version of AMOS. It's going to be faster, more powerful, have a longer range, more accurate navigation, and it's going to look amazing. Some potential designs for the hull have been considered:

although nothing definite has been decided yet. Steven Fox, a mechanical engineering technician at Measurand has agreed to help me out with the hull design and construction in his off-hours, so no doubt he will greatly improve upon whatever I would have come up with. I had looked a little bit into 3D-printing or urethane casting for the next version, but these alternatives seemed quite pricey, and I wasn't sure how sturdy the finished product would be. So for now at least, it's looking like it is going to be another foam and fiberglass construction. Just better looking. 😎

Prior to this build I watched a couple of how-to soldering videos on YouTube to refine my technique, and then put together a couple of AMOSRemote boards, one for the handheld unit and one for AMOS:

The boards are fairly simple, so by trying to solder them correctly I was able to actually get them finished much faster (in a few hours) and more cleanly. Only one pad destroyed due to excessive heating. 

Assembling the battery box has been taking a bit longer, but is so far shaping up nicely:

Getting the Raspberry Pi setup will be quite easy. Loading the software is as simple as backing up the existing SD card onto a new one. Getting all of the electrical work done shouldn't take more than a few more days I think. If all the assembly work were organized with readily available parts on shelves that I didn't need to spend hours searching around the house for, I think the electronics for a full AMOS unit could be completed by a single person in a couple of days. 

One of the improvements that will be made on this next build is the addition of survey grade positioning. I picked up a couple of survey antennas and evaluation boards from Taiwan: http://navspark.mybigcommerce.com/px1122r-evb-px1122r-multi-band-quad-gnss-rtk-evaluation-board/. I'm looking forward to their arrival this Friday; it should be interesting to see if it is really possible to get cm-level precision on AMOS by using RTK (Real-time kinematic) with base station and remote devices. 

If anyone happens to be a reader of Ocean News and Technology (https://www.oceannews.com/) be sure to check out their December issue when it is released  (should be any day now!). There may be an article in there that mentions AMOS! 😉