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Showing posts from April, 2014

PCB Manufacturing, Prototyping & R&D in the Maldives

Custom ESP32-S3 development board — professionally manufactured by JLCPCB. A far cry from where it all started. It Started in a School Science Lab — Around 1998 Most people who get into electronics start with a kit, a tutorial, maybe a breadboard and some LEDs. I started by sneaking ferric chloride out of a school science lab to etch my first PCB. That was around 1998. I was living in the Maldives — a small island nation in the Indian Ocean — where there was no electronics supply chain, no maker community, no local PCB fab. Just a chemistry cabinet at school, a copper-clad board from somewhere, and a lot of curiosity. This post is about what the next 25+ years of PCB prototyping looked like from there. The early wins with proper chemicals, the years of improvisation when those chemicals disappeared, the real injuries, the failed boards, and finally — the moment JLCPCB changed ever...

Test run for Autonomous boat. 18-04-2014

Today we planed to conduct as much as possible test runs before sunset so we did three successful missions. For today's test new gadget was introduced to record video from front of the boat. So i modified a key chain camera( which the battery is damaged) and fixed a 3.7V battery to power it and it was gooood. :). I gave a name to this mod as "Go puroa". Go puroa All the three test was good but due to some technical issues an unattended guys the test was bit delayed. The boat traveled around 60 - 70 meters wider way-point locations. Command center which uploads all mission way-points and manual override if any thing goes wrong (if the boat goes too from reach due to some error). Few data result of the test . Even though the sea is not calm enough the boat tries its best to with the small waves. videos will be uploaded soon once all videos are converted to up loadable format to YouTube. Conclusion:  There few code fixing to be done while...

The autonomous boat build.

Today is one of my happiest days of invention. Finally after lots of frustration of hardware limitations and experimenting day and night on my free time, i manage to test my hardware part in real environment condition. I am talking about a vessel which runs autonomously to the way-points and returns to home without any control by me or anyone. I can not go too deep on this project cause this is group project which i am working on and i hope the final product will be live on web once fully completed. The test run first run was a mess, yes it was a mess with lack of knowledge of building the steering and motor control the whole test was a failure and a passing by small boat help us to rescue out boat. So after this i have stop building this further and starts experimenting and learning the steering logic. Kab0000000ms Kaboooms and loss of valuable hardware during hardware experimenting but with support managed to get new stuffs to start the experiments again. Re Test run ( the...