HBRD3 - Navigation & Depth

These are a few Tekna scuba gauges a found on eBay, the first one is a depth gauge and the second one is a compass. Nothing high tech here, these will just be placed in view of the camera. They are probably 20 years old but I tested the depth gauge in my Pressure Chamber and it seems to work fine.

After buying the above gauges I decided to see if I could get a little more high tech and try using a digital compass on this Rov. I found this Dinsmore 1490 Compass Sensor on the web (The sensor is the white object in the middle of the board) and it looked like it would be pretty easy to connect to the Phidgets board. It only took me about a half hour to add the lines of code needed for the program now I just had to figure out how to hook it to the actual Phidgets card. I threw together this simple board with the help of this diagram I found on the web. I had a little trouble with the interface to the Phidgets board but with a little help from the Robotrov Group (thanks Bill) I had it working in no time. The whole thing only cost about $25.00 and gives me 8 Compass point directions on screen.

Here's a quick Video of the first tests.

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