Maddie Status Report (3/29/25)

This week, most of my time was spent working on the general boat structure in preparation for our interim demo. Our propeller motors ended up not being waterproof and all of the waterproof motors that we could purchase were either too expensive or wouldn’t come in time. As a result, we spent a lot of time ideating on possible solutions – in the end, we landed on extending the axles such that the motors are above water and at an angle.

Specifically, I spent time this week figuring out where to make holes in our boat – both for the axles and the underwater camera cable – and making them. Additionally, I supported Abie and Emma in implementing the propeller changes, taking the lead on waterproofing our entire boat. Although we plan on shaping the foam base, this will likely take place after we begin testing in water, post interim demo. Because we were using our waterproof paste in order to fix the hardware that I sourced to allow the axles to spin at the desired angle, we wanted to go ahead and waterproof the rest too.

Additionally, after talking with Emma about the camera process, I determined that it would actually be better to process image stills from the camera, rather than to get stills ourselves from a video feed. As a result, I worked on both reverting and updating our code a bit to implement this change, as I had previously been working on supporting video input. I need to finalize the demo-version of this functionality a bit more, but it’s largely complete and will definitely be ready for demos this week.