So Tired

We've been awake for 40+ hours.  But the boat and controller are working great!  Pictures and video to come.  Presentation tomorrow!

When Hulk and Thor decide to smash something ...

... It gets smashed. Here's our controller. Half the team non-stop for five days - worth it. Behold.

Science!

Check out all of our boat and controller electronics (minus compasses) working!

Reporting For Duty

An army of MOSFETs to run our 8 fans.  And some voltage regulation on the left for PICs and the servo.  This board should handle all of the boat-side power distribution.

Final (?) Design

We hate the balloon, so we've decided to drag it on its own raft.  The raft is constrained radially but not tangentially so it will rotate to be at our "aft" no matter which way we drive.  The bumper is low now - at the water line - to keep it away from our fans and poppers.

Off the pot. Onto the compass.

Instead of a synthetic potentiometer input, we now have engine light-up (well, LED light-up) running with real live compasses.  Jubilation prevails.

Only downside - the code has to be fine tuned for each individual circuit, which has to be fine-tuned for each individual compass.  But, four unique bin levels isn't all that bad.

I just hope the boat's vibranium coating will cut down on signal noise like we expect.

Switch -> LED. Emphasis on the '->'

We have a functional balloon monitor!  One of the more ridiculously complicated switches I've seen.  Some really subtle bugs, and at least one fantastically stupid one.  On to real project stuff!

Woot.