CONCEPT REPORT

After rounds of discussion, we have edited and finalized the main functions of the vehicle.

Function

This vehicle will be able to detect the temperature of the water surface with an accuracy of 0.1 degree celsius using the temperature sensor that we used in the week 1 activity. The boat can be operated by 2 ways, the first is automatic control and the other is by manual control.

For the automatic operation, the vehicle will be able to move by itself intelligently without people controlling.This is definitely more work-efficient and reduce unnecessary man-power.  When it reaches the end of a lane, it will change directions to the next lane, which means that which it reaches a specific distance, it will automatically turn 90 degree and so on until a lawn mower pattern is achieved.

If the automatic system malfunctions, we can switch to manual control to control the movement of the vehicle. This is to prevent an accident from happening.

Not only that, our vehicle will move in a lawn mowing pattern to obtain the temperature of surface water at different position from time to time in automatic mode. Why does it move in a lawn mowing pattern? This is because by moving our vehicle with lawn mowing pattern, we can obtain data with larger coverage of area on water and also more detailed results of water temperature.

A phone app will be created for this vehicle. This apps can collect data of the water surface temperature from the vehicle and calculate out the average temperature for the surface water. A warning message will be sent to the users through the apps if the temperature of water is either too high or too low. This function is indispensably essential especially to biologists for them to prevent algae bloom. Early blue–green algae blooms usually develop when water temperature is higher and there is increase of light. Water temperatures above 25°C are optimal for the growth of Cyanobacteria. Hence, our product is important for biologists to take control of water temperature so that they can prepare precautionary steps to counter the algae bloom problem.

FINAL DESIGN

Overall structure:

Our product resembles a fighting jet. Cool, isn’t it?

The main body structure will be made by acrylic which will be laser cut in Fab Lab.

Wondering how our vehicle will look like when the motor turn? Let's go to the link below to explore it! :D

http://i1376.photobucket.com/albums/ah39/Dylono0o/Water%20Surveyor_zpsmh42xwhy.gif?t=1448978085

Parts

1. Motor bracket ( Quantity: 2 )

• Material : 3D print thermoplastic

• The hole of the bracket is best fit to the motor, it is to hold the motor tightly underwater.

• There are 2 slits on the bracket to give tolerance to hold the motor.
• A hole is created on the above slit so that we can put in screw and lock it with nut.
• When the slit is pressed by the screw and nut, a compressive force will acted on the motor hence the motor is holded tightly in the bracket.

2.   Keel ( Quantity : 1 )

• Material : Acryllic

• Its function is to balance our product movement on the water. This is important as our aim is to control the product to move in a lawn mower pattern.
• There are 3 extruded parts on our keel to fit into the slits of the base.

   

3.   Keel Holder ( Quantity : 3 )

• Material : 3D print thermoplastic

• Its function is to hold the keel.
• The extruded parts of the keel will fit into the hole of the keel and then we can lock it with screws and nuts.

4. Base  ( Quantity : 1 )

• Material : Acrylic

• It is made of acrylic, which can be achieved by laser cutting in Fab Lab.
• The thickness of this base will be 9 mm. Hence, 3 piece of acrylic base will be stacked together.
• The base has 3 slits for the keel to slide in.
• This base is designed in a T-shape instead of rectangle because this will increase the surface area. When the thickness is constant, the T-shape base will have larger volume. Hence, the volume of water displaced will increase which then increase the upthrust force (buoyancy force).

5. ‘Level 2’

• Material : Acrylic

• A piece of acrylic is located in the middle of the body structure, the position is far above the water level.

• This level is to locate all the electrical stuff like arduino boards and etc.
• This can ensure that the electrical stuff will not have chance to in contact with water if the water flow into the base of vehicle.

6. Ultrasonic sensor  ( Quantity : 1 )

• The ultrasonic sensor need to be located under the base which is submerged in the water to detect to wall in front.
• When the ultrasonic sense the wall in front, it will send signal to the arduino and then a signal will be sent to the motor, commanding it to slow down and ready to change direction.
• Hence, a bracket is made to hold the ultrasonic sensor and mount the bracket to the base by using screws and nuts.
• The end of the ultrasonic sensor is threaded, the part can be inserted into the hole at the bracket and tighten it with a nut.

7. Temperature sensor  ( Quantity : 1 )

• There is a hole at the back of the vehicle for the temperature sensor.
• The temperature sensor is connected with the arduino uno will pass through the hole and dip into the water to measure the temperature of the surface of water.

8. Pipe  ( Quantity : 2 )

• The two pipes are located at the two sides of the vehicle to increase the stability of the vehicle on water and they act as floating elements.
• The two pipes are located at the far left side and right side to achieve stability of vehicle on water.

• The pipe diameter can be determined by calculation of buoyancy force in order to make sure that the volume of water displaced is enough to support the vehicle to float on water.

9.  Pipe Bracket  ( Quantity : 4 ) *2 at each side*

• Material : 3D print thermoplastic

• Its function is to hold the pipes.
• It has a U shape for the pipe to fit in.

Different perspective

TOP VIEW

FRONT VIEW

SIDE VIEW

BACK VIEW

Block Diagram

Circuit Diagram

How does the vehicle work?

1. Firstly, we have to decide and set the first turn direction,either left or right. For example, if we put our vehicle at the right of the reservoir, there is a wall at the right side so we set the first turn to be left direction. When the vehicle activates, the motor will run and the vehicle will move forward.

2. When the ultrasonic sensor senses wall in front, the arduino will send signal to the motor to stop it. After a few seconds, the arduino will send signal again to the left motor to turn in reverse direction and right motor remains in forward direction. Thus now the vehicle will turn to left.

3. After turning left, both motors will turn in forward direction for a few seconds.After a certain distance, the vehicle turns left again by using reversing the left motor and forwarding the right motor. Then the vehicle will continue to move forward and collect temperature.( For the program, if we set the first turn to be left, then the second turn will be right, this is a constant and consistent pattern.)

4. When the vehicle reach the end, it will sense the front wall and make a left turn. Yet, it will sense another wall again so the arduino is programmed to cancel all the operations and the vehicle will stop at there.

5. When the operations are done, the vehicle will send a message to the phone apps to inform the user that the vehicle are ready to collect. Then the user can use manual control to bring back the vehicle to the original position.

Thank you! Do leave your comments below to improve our vehicle. :)

Activity 6: Wireless Sensor Networks

                     

                Activity 6: Wireless Sensor Networks

          Hey Guys, Welcome back to our Blog. This Week we got a 3 course introduction meal to Zigbee. What is Zigbee you ask? Well Zigbee is basically a Wireless Network that allows Devices to "talk" to each other. It can be used to create smart environments with sensors, that feeds information to a main coordinator. For our activity we used 2 Xbee module to communicate with each other. Xbee is an interchangeable module by Zigbee with an antenna to transmit signals. You can slap it on to any device with either an USB adapter called a XBee Explorer Dongle or a RX/TX adapter called a XBee Explorer Reguated for micro controllers in our case an Arduino. Enjoy your meal, Bon Appetit !

The first Course: Hors D'voure (the starter)

          Our very first task is to establish a connection within our group. In order to do this we first need to know the serial numbers for both modules. We connected our Xbee to the XBee Explorer Dongle and hooked it up to our computer. Then we had to open up our pre-downloaded XCTU on our computer. Our group faced a few problems in this part. Our first problem was our computer couldn't find the Xbee. In order to solve this problem we had to try all the USB ports on our computer. Then we had to copy down both modules serial high and serial low number and register them in the other one. Our group modules couldn't link with each other as we forgot to press Write in order to save the serial numbers into each module.

Registering the Serial Numbers

         Once we had establish a connection we had connect a circuit to the Arduino and code the Arduino such that when it received an 'a' form our computer it would light up a LED and turn off the LED when it received a 'b'.

Circiut Connection

The second course: The Main Dish

          The next thing we need to do was to communicate with another group. To do this we had to get their serial number and give them ours to link up the modules. 

Hard at Work Connecting and Writing the Other Group Serial Numbers

           One group had to connect a "Switch" circuit and acted as a switch to on the other group "buzzer" circuit.

Switch Circuit

Buzzer Circuit

The last course: The Dessert :D

            The last thing we had to do was to send data to our lecturer. Basically we had to combine our sensor code from our week 1 with the code that sends the data. Unfortunately we all had a problem and couldn't send the data properly over.

           Ok guys this brings us to the end of our activity. We hoped you enjoyed this meal as much as we did. See you next week !

Activity 5 : Water Treatment (Sedimentation and Filtration)

Activity 5 : Water Treatment (Sedimentation and Filtration)

We had done with the activity related to coagulation and flocculation during week 2 of our module.This week, we are doing the activity the other two water treatment process which are sedimentation and filtration.Before the lesson,we were instructed by our lecturer to watch the videos which uploaded by him to eduCanon.The videos gave us some ideas about what we will be doing during our lesson.

Filtration and Sedimentation

Our first activity is Sedimentation and below are the materials needed for our first activity.

Clear Water, Cooking oil, Small balls

First, we are required to calculate the settling velocity of the small ball in clear water and cooking oil using the formula below:

Here is our calculations:

After that, we start our activity to find out the experimental values of the 2 different situation. Due to the distance is needed to calculate the velocity, so we measure the length of the fluid contained in two bottle first before we start.

 

We put the small ball slowly to the oil and water and video recording the process using UberSense apps which we required to install it before our lesson. This app enable us to determine the time at which the small balls pass through each position by scrolling through the video.

Small ball passing through water 

Small ball passing through oil

We carry out the experiment twice in order to get more accurate results by calculating their average values.

Experimental results

Although that our experimental values are different with our theoretical values, but we can conclude that small ball travels faster in water than in cooking oil according to our experimental results. This is because the cooking oil is more viscous than the water.

Our second activity is to build an effective rapid water filter by using the materials given to our group: 

 

For our group, we are going to use gravel as our bottom (4 cm) and charcoal on top (3 cm).

After building our water filter, we need to clean our filter with about 1 litre of clean tap water before we pour in the dirty water.We are required to filter 3 water samples and each samples must be at least 100 ml.Due to the limitation of time, we need to shake our water filter slowly to increase the speed of its process in order to finish our experiment on time.

After getting the samples after filtration, we have to measure the turbidity, pH and conductivity of water before and after the filtration.

Measuring turbidity

Measuring pH

Measuring conductivity

This is the final result which we get from our filtration activity:

According to our results, it is quiet unexpected that our turbidity decreases because at first we think that it might be become more dirty because of the charcoal.However, we know that the first step, which is rinse our filter with tap water had greatly reduces the impurities of our filter system after our discussion. Besides that, the pH of water after filtration had increase about 3 because the charcoal is alkaline.

From these two activity, we learnt more about sedimentation and filtration. We also learnt about how to get a clean water and build water filter system. However, although the filtered water is clean, but it is still not suitable for drinking because it contains bacteria and microorganism which cannot be filter.

That's all for our this week's activities. Thank you for reading.