Salt Water is Deadly (For Electronics)

It turns out that the camera module was permanently damaged by just a few drips of salt water that got into its enclosure. Also, the solar panel is no longer functioning. Yesterday (after receiving some instructions from the manufacturer) I pried open the electronics box at its base, and did a couple of multimeter tests. The open circuit voltage was way too low, even after completely drying out the electronics overnight. I think I'll see if I can find a replacement that has some better water resistance. This is the second one that I've burned through, although I'm not sure exactly what happened to the first one, it stopped working after a really hot day in June, so maybe it overheated.

I did a bit of experimenting this week with possible anchor designs, trying out a NEMA-17 stepper motor with a TB6600 stepper motor driver and an Arduino Uno. I even tried 3D printing some gears, but the mechanical precision of my prints isn't really that great; the gears kept getting locked up at a certain point. I'll need to buy a stepper motor with a gearbox attached to it, in order to lift an anchor that weighs more than a 250 g wrench. Anyway, this is where things stand with that right now:

I also got out to Wookastook for a couple of tests. The first of these was kind of strange: a couple of times AMOS seemed to get locked into a mode where its propeller just got stuck at some angle, so that it kept turning repeatedly in a tight circle. The program was still running, but not saving anything to the log file, so I'm not sure exactly what happened. I've seen the same thing happen sometimes before, but previously I thought it was just caused by the program crashing, but I was able to confirm this time that the program was actually still running. Possibly it was a multithreading bug in the program that resulted in a deadlock condition. I tried inserting more debug code to see if I could better isolate what was going on before the problem occurred, but of course after that debug code was added I haven't been able to reproduce the issue. I'll try it out some more over the next few days, to hopefully reproduce and fix the issue.