AMOS Remote Unveiled

Moving into week 2 of the COVID-19 quarantine, my work days are still fortunately much the same as they have been for the last 2 years. Wake-up, eat, shower (sometimes not), work on AMOS-stuff until noon, go for a solitary half-hour ski in the woods, do Measurand stuff until 5, have supper, sometimes go for another ski, do some more AMOS and / or software contracting stuff, then relax for a bit before bed. I guess the only difference is that I'm no longer working in the Measurand building.

This past week I finished populating the components for the AMOS Remote board:

Once my soldering faults were corrected, I tested everything out. The USB to serial wireless connection worked well, but I couldn't properly connect the USB to the Bluetooth (HM-10) board for setting up some default Bluetooth parameters. I looked up the schematic, and pictures of the HM-10 on Amazon (the pins are labeled on the bottom of the HM-10 board), and discovered that the board pin layout was the reverse of what it should have been. After de-soldering and re-soldering the HM-10 upside-down, it worked fine. Reversing the layout of the pins on the mainboard looks like it should be pretty straightforward.

While I was working on soldering, I also soldered up an ADS1115 variable gain board, to get a better picture for the website and instruction manual. The soldering job was better than last time, but still looked a bit messy, and required some hacking around in Photoshop to improve it a little bit:

On the weekend, I spent some time applying fiberglass to the top and sides of AMOS-CAT (the Catamaran version of AMOS). It took me about 2 hours to cut and tape the fiberglass cloth in place on one of the pontoons. Kind of like wrapping a very difficult Christmas present. Thankfully, my daughter Bexie was agreeable to wrapping the other pontoon (for a reasonable price). She was able to do the job in about an hour, and frankly did a better job than I did. The picture below shows the boat after the cloth was applied to the top and sides and epoxied in place. I still need to sand it down and smooth out the bubbles and sharp edges before fiberglassing the bottom.