Tuesday, September 17, 2019

A Week of Finger Burning (a.k.a. Soldering)

Turns out AMOS had sustained a bit more damage than I had originally thought last week. The pH and turbidity electronics signal boards had also been fried, so they had to be replaced too. Luckily they weren't super-expensive. Re-doing all of the wiring for the new Raspberry Pi 3B+ and the replacement RF220SU wireless unit took an inordinate amount of time though. The heating element in my soldering iron was slowly dying and the pins on the wireless transceiver were spaced only 2 mm apart, so needless to say there were some moments of extreme frustration trying to get all of the little solder blobs onto the right pins and wires. I really like the wireless module, but I wish there were a better package for it, i.e. something with a 20-pin header for easily plugging, unplugging wires would make things so much easier. Could be a new product there...

I just finished wiring up and testing everything today, so I think this new build of AMOS is ready to go. Although it's still a bit of a mess inside, the CPU box has considerably more room with the smaller Pi board, no more USB hub, and a few stray wires cleaned up:


I'm anxious to get AMOS back in the water for more testing. The forecast is calling for 5 straight days of sunshine, so hopefully it will be able to get lots of km over the next week.

Here's a picture taken from a couple of weeks ago on one of the first rescue missions. AMOS is looking kind of lonely under the shade of some trees on the south side of the river:



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