Electronics Goals

For the electronic components of the boat, we had some features in mind even at a very early stage. We wanted two bilge pumps to both propel our boat forward and for our high pressure water turret. We also wanted our boat to contain accelerometers and gyroscopes to sense the loading due to pump forces. Sophisticated algorithms on the PIC will drive the response of the propulsion system to this loading. Another one of our goals was to include a Bluetooth receiver on the vessel to enable remote-control from an Android phone. Another important feature and a safety aspect as well was securing the batteries. By not properly protecting them, it is easy to create a volatile situation since the boat operates in water. While most of our boat is custom built and designed, we found that simply buying smaller components could save time, effort, and money. In the future, we would like to implement a temperature sensing circuit so that the boat could detect fires. While the circuit was in fact completed, it was not ready to be implemented on this iteration of our project.