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Disc Retriever

Posted: Sep 29th, 2017, 9:11 am
by rokenbuzz
I play recreational disc golf and sometimes lose a disc, and sometimes in a pond. Discs generally sink.
Occasionally there are people who scuba to retrieve discs or throw in these sort of scoop-baskets on rope to randomly pull out what they can.
I'm working on a ROV to retrieve discs.

My ROV will use a Raspberry Pi on-board, with a IR RPi camera, ethernet cable as a tether to shore.
My on-shore laptop will have an application to communicate to the RPi and receive the video stream from the ROV and uses an XBox controller.
The ROV thrusters are the typical 3 bilge pump set up described on this site. Left, right, and vertical.
I'm using I2C, an RPi servo board, and a few motor controllers to PWM the motors.
A standard servo motor, with diy waterproofing, will open and close a gripper to pick up discs.
Batteries will be lithium polymer on-board.
I also have an accelerometer and digital compass, mostly because I already own them and I can.
I have 940nm IR leds that I also had on the shelf that I'll try for my lighting.

At this point I'm breadboarding and writing initial software. I'm controlling my servo and little test motors, and reading accelerometer and compass data.
I also have streaming video working as a test, with minimal lag.

I like to work on this on evenings and not hide in the basement from my family, so at the moment I'm breadboarding and writing software in my family room. Here's my end table :P
end_table_workbench.jpg
end_table_workbench.jpg (233.48 KiB) Viewed 6882 times

Re: Disc Retriever

Posted: Sep 30th, 2017, 3:43 am
by Oldsirhippy
The depth of my ignorance knows no bounds !

Had to look up disk golf, it looks like a fun game.

I hope your ROV successfully retrieves loads of disks.

Re: Disc Retriever

Posted: Oct 25th, 2017, 12:18 pm
by rokenbuzz
Still working on my submersible when I have time.
It's still a mess of wires on the end table, but I'll be moving on to creating a few boards to mount my sensors and connectors to.
IMG_20171024_220739666_b.jpg
IMG_20171024_220739666_b.jpg (207.32 KiB) Viewed 6750 times

Re: Disc Retriever

Posted: Mar 27th, 2018, 1:01 pm
by MantFish
Wow looks really cool!
I'm just wondering what grabber are you using to collect the discs and how does the communication between the laptop and the RPI work?

Thanks!
-MantFish <><

Re: Disc Retriever

Posted: Dec 28th, 2018, 2:27 pm
by rokenbuzz
I'm still working on workbench. I'm just starting to think about the PVC frame.
I'm using a servo and an "Actobotics" gripper kit from robotstore.com

The PC app has a user interface and controls, and I use an XBox controller.
Communication between PC and RPi uses zeroMQ sending Google protocol buffers.
My RPi app is written in C++, and PC app in C#.
Each side uses the zeroMQ library to communicate to the other using custom google protobuf messages.

Messages to the RPi contain thruster and gripper percentages.
Messages to the PC contain sensor data.

Video is streamed separate from either of these apps. Using raspivid and gstreamer.