Carnegie Mellon ECE Capstone, Spring 2025 - Abigael O'Donnell, Emma Hoffman, Maddie Burroughs
This week, I spent a lot of time waterproofing and testing the boat as a complete unit in the UC pool. Emma and I spent a significant amount of time reworking the physical design and waterproofing after we identified several issues where the boat was …
I spent most of this week being proud of Emma for killing it on the final presentation <33 I spent a lot of time this week working on the things mentioned in the team report that were necessary to get the boat in the …
This week we completed our final presentation (shout out Emma for presenting!) and we were able to get our boat in the pool (see images below). We put together walls on the boat, added pool noodles so that it would float, waterproofed the bottom of the boat with liquid silicone, and made a smaller submersible acrylic casing for the camera to reduce the weight.
We waterproofed the boat and we were able to get it in the water on Friday, however the boat and the submersible took on water. Luckily our major electronics were preserved, but we noticed many things that needed improvement.
Overall we spent Saturday 4/26 fixing the above issues, and we are testing again tomorrow in the pool. We are also working on our poster due Monday. Next steps include testing in the water with our improved waterproofing system, collecting data, and taking our video. We will practice what we intend to do for the final demonstration as well.
This week, I presented the final presentation in class. I practiced the presentation Monday and Tuesday and gave the presentation on Wednesday. I also constructed the walls of the boat, and did all of the additional waterproofing with Abie and Maddie. I went with Abie …
This week, I set up a meeting with the CMU Aquatics director that Emma and I attended in order to coordinate times that we could test our project in the UC pool. We also confirmed that we will be able to demo in the diving …
This week, our group has been focusing on the final stages of integrating in order to get the boat and camera unit assembled and into the water. Abie and Emma have been working on testing the submersible camera unit in the UC pool, and have taken images using different pool toys to mimic coral under the water, which will be used to verify the ML algorithm. Emma and Maddie worked together to integrate the code from the underwater motors and the stepper motor, which controls the depth of our submersible. These two functions are now displayed together in the Arduino Cloud Interface. Our new temperature sensor arrived late in the week and was also added to the interface. Maddie worked on debugging and finalizing the stepper motor code and circuit as well as soldering our various circuits together onto a final protoboard. She also laser cut an acrylic box designed by Emma to house our submersible unit. As a team, we are on track to complete the project. Our final tasks include additional waterproofing, which has been slightly delayed due to our ordered parts arriving this Monday and Tuesday. For our final demo, we also plan to prepare spare parts so that if something goes wrong, we will be able to switch out that individual part. For waterproofing, we ordered more waterproof sealant, some liquid silicone sealant for the cable, waterproof tape for the cable, and extra parts for all of our electronics, if something is damaged during testing. We have extra acrylic that we will likely use to waterproof the electrical components on top of the boat. We also all are helping prepare our final presentation slides. Below are some videos and videos that show our current prototyping progress.
Video: Three videos of components on the cloud working together
This week, most of my time was spent finalizing electronic components on the boat. I spent an atrocious number of hours (7?) trying to debug our stepper motor set up before realizing that the Arduino Nano was broken. Because of time and based on the …
This week, I spent time integrating and testing our system. On Monday, I helped Abie put together our pH sensor, but it ended up not working, so we ordered a temperature sensor instead that would be easier to integrate into our system, and give us …
This week I worked on several things regarding the boat with the team, including the planning for finishing up our project and waterproofing the boat. Additionally, I worked on making the output of the ML algorithm more usable/interpretable for a scientist working on the coral bleaching project. The first change I made was removing the text on the images so that the output uses just color to instead of an additional cluttering label for the images. The second major change I made was to include a text file with written information about the image (what percentage of the image falls under each classification and what the overall classification is). I am still deciding what the final written information would be most valuable so this could change but I am satisfied with where the code is right now. Once the boat is water ready I will be taking a variety of images and classifying those with the camera so that is what I anticipate spending a lot of time on next week. I also worked on the temperature and pH sensor, although I ran into significant hurdles on my end with uploading code from either Arduino cloud or Arduino IDE as both require an initial physical connection with the computer and my computer drivers were not able to detect anything in the ports. As of now I have code that I am confident in but has not been tested, so I will handle that during our group meeting tomorrow with Emma as she is able to upload to her board. The main issue I foresee with this is calibrating the sensor, but I plan to do this using regular water and then adding measured amounts of salt to mimic the ocean water.
Team Status Report Our waterproof motors arrived this week! This allowed us to remove the makeshift motor mounting system that we had developed (rip stem kit 🙏) and work on integrating these instead. Additionally, we set a goal of having an operational boat – out …