Anchor Development, Mapping Software, and Getting Out to Socialize

This week I experimented with a few different physical configurations of a microswitch and a 3D-printed "bumper" for the anchor, so that the anchor software would have some definite way of telling when the anchor was fully lifted up out of the water. Easy stuff right? Nope. The wrench that I am currently using as an anchor tends to sway and rotate a bit as it is being lifted up on the fishing line by the stepper motor. My initial iterations of the bumper were too small, and generally the wrong shape to be able to consistently strike the microswitch. Also, the microswitch wasn't really at an ideal angle for making contact with the bumper. I now have a conical shaped bumper which is large enough to strike the microswitch on the crane at the right angle, and still small enough to probably avoid getting stuck on the edge of the boat. I'm going to have to adjust the motor stepping rate though, because it currently slows down when it thinks it is getting close to the switch, which can sometimes cause enough vibration to set the switch closed prematurely. If changing the motor speed doesn't work, maybe changing the software to wait for a slightly longer switch closure time will work better.

I have also spent a couple of days doing tutorials and trying to learn about the ArcGIS software development kit (SDK) for adding really fancy mapping features and graphics to the user software for controlling AMOS, generating a mapped path for it to follow, and viewing the resultant data in a nice eye catching format. It's a pretty huge SDK, but initially at least, I'll probably only need to use a small portion of it, so hopefully by next blog I'll have a cool little software demo to show for my efforts.

Even robot nerds need to get out sometimes, have some beer and pizza, and socialize a little bit. As I've written before,  In Nature Robotics is part of the Venn Garage program (http://www.venninnovation.com/en/venn-garage) and this evening there was a social event to meet the other startup members. There was even a friendly "pitch" competition in which the founders pitched their businesses, except it was with a bit of a twist, you had to be playing ping pong while doing so.

I was able to listen to other people talk about their business while playing ping pong, but when it came time for me to speak, I found it impossible to concentrate on the ball too... I mostly hit wild shots or net shots while I tried to explain in a short minute what I was doing with AMOS. It was fun though, and interesting to hear about all the diverse ideas that people were working on. There might even be some potential contacts and / or opportunities for AMOS that originated from this too, which would be awesome!