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 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 …
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 …
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 …
This week, I spent most of my time working with the team to prepare for the interim demo. As our current motors are not waterproof and our new ones will not be in for the demo, we had to come up with a way to use our current motors with the boat. We were able to find a material to extend our motor axles (so that the propellors will be underwater) and I 3D printed a part to friction connect the original axle of the motor to the extended axle. This was fun for me because I have not used any type of CAD software before. I also helped with waterproofing the boat and general preparation for the demo.
For the ML software, I added training data to the model and am working on preparing a testing/validation metric for the interim demo. The testing is slightly behind where I would like to be but I think we are in a good place for the demo. I believe I am on schedule as most of the work I have left will be integration which I can do while improving the model and assisting the team in other ways. My next step will be integrating the temp/pH sensor into our project.
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 …