Saturday 23 February 2013

Too Much Thrust (if that's possible)

Well, I never really realised when I referred to churning up some water in my previous post what level of churning would eventually ensue!

Now I have digital, rather than analogue control over the thruster, the amount of thrust I'm seeing has dramatically increased, check out the video .....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0PFFVKrDRQ

I definitely need a bigger test tank!

Saturday 16 February 2013

Thruster Under RS485 Control

I've recently received and populated a new thruster control PCB (ESC), which seems to be working well.

Here's a picture of a stack of nine of the blank PCBs that I need to populate (solder all the components on to) next.


Here's a video of the motor being controlled via the populated PCB, a Windows GUI and a USB to RS485 converter. The GUI is written in National Instruments LabVIEW, which I find to be a very good programming language to use.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgHm8I5G6i8

I've also put four off two pin headers on the PCB so I can address the boards on the multidrop RS485 bus and "talk" to and control them individually.

Next step is to get the new PCB loaded up electrically in the test tank, churn some water up so to speak :)