General Inquiry Hardware and Online Documentation

[BerkY]

Hello, me and a small team are building our own UUV this year and decided to use ArduSub to handle for most of the software stuff on it. Looking through the documentation we have some hardware questions that we could find the answer to.

1. How reliable is this documentation? Some pages seem to specify a previous version and are wondering how much of this we should take at face value, especially the compatibility issues. Is the new version more compatible?. Like are we still locked to a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B for the onboard computer in the most recent version?

2. If we have 3rd party temperature and pressure sensors I imagine we can’t directly use them with the Autopilot no? If we have a different light, can we connect it directly?

3. We use a sensors that ArduSub isn’t designed to interact with: a Dissolved Oxygen sensor. Our original plan is to create a ROS node and run that to interact with the sensor and collect that data and run this node parallel with ArduSub software on the onboard computer. Is this realistic/best practice?

We would really appreciate any help, thank you for your time.

[tony-white]

Hi @BerkY -
Welcome to the forums!

1. That is indeed a good reference for ArduSub, but it is out of date in some places and in the process of being replaced - any reference to Companion OS is old and should be ignored! This documentation may be helpful and is more up to date.
2. Only temperature and pressure sensors supported by ArduSub will be plug-and-play - so the Blue Robotics Celsisu, Bar30, or Bar100! Another sensor that communicates via i2c or serial could be supported, but would require modifying and recompiling the ArduSub firmware…
3. I would think ROS is considerably more complicated than you need to record a DO sensor. You could do so with a python script (and turn it into an extension!) or for a no-code solution, use Node-RED. This will also let you log the DO values in your overall autopilot .BIN log (found in the Log Browser.)