Maddie Status Report (3/22/25)

This week we finally got our stepper motor and drivers in!

Most of this week was spent setting up the motor; one of the drivers (the one I opened first) seems to have an issue with it where two of the pins are shorted. So much time was spent trying to get the stepper driver to work :/ only for this to have been the problem. Nevertheless, we now have the drive set up, running, and able to track position. The position tracking code is pretty accurate, though this week will be spent continuing to test it, and is able to track depth given the spool’s diameter and the cable’s thickness, as well as the offset needed to get over the edge of the boat (which is set to 0 currently).

Additionally, I continued working on the image recombination code this week. OpenCV has a few different stitching algorithms, each of which have pros and cons related to accuracy and efficiency. Because surveying will be occurring in a zig-zag sort of pattern, we’re currently running into a problem where the image’s orientation changes (because the boat turns), causing stitching to fail or be done incorrectly. I’m working on a way to process the video such that we’re able to know when orientation changes occur automatically, without having to keep any metadata during the survey. Without accounting for turns, image stitching from videos is going well, so this will be the obstacle of the week 🙂