Hello, and welcome to our forums! 
This is a space for our awesome community to share, discuss, and explore exciting ideas, projects, and products in the marine robotics space. We’re here to support and interact with anyone working with or using our vehicles, software and products, but also things you build, or dives you go on, along with all those awesome third party products, from our distributors and elsewhere, that you can (or want to) use with our equipment. We also encourage general discussion of marine robotics, exploration, science, and furthering our shared understanding of all things underwater.
To use the forum effectively it helps to know what’s possible to do, so here’s an introduction to using the forum, including its layout and features, along with some tips for formatting content in your posts. You may wish to bookmark this post to refer back to later 
Contents (Skip to Section)
Getting Started
Home-page Overview:
Tags are useful to pull together topics that are related but already fit into existing separate categories. The most relevant ones to know about are:
- news for product announcements and other updates (by us and others)
- guide for when a post is a guide for other users
- vehicle-design for posts discussing best practices and relevant calculations and considerations when designing or modifying vehicles
- simulate for all things simulation
- poll for polls/surveys (generally relevant to product developments)
- arduino for Arduino related posts, and
- pymavlink for posts using or getting support for the pymavlink Python library.
Interacting with Posts
click for: main options, more options, accessing your bookmarks, quoting a reply
Main options:
... (more options):
Accessing your bookmarks:
Click your profile in the top right corner, then click the bookmarks icon to access your bookmarked comments.
Quoting in a reply
Select the content you want to respond to, and press the ‘Quote’ button that appears. You can have several quotes in one reply.
Before Posting
When you’re planning to start a discussion thread or ask a question, it’s always a good idea to search first, to find what’s already been covered.
Searching the Forum
Simple Search
Press the search icon in the top right corner, and type your search term. Press enter to search.
Advanced Search
Click ‘options’ in the simple search to access sorting and filtering options.
‘Docs’ Search
Somewhere between simple and advanced search, the ‘Docs’ tab tries to present posts as though they’re a form of documentation. It allows filtering by whether posts are solved, and smartly filtering by categories and tags that are relevant to what’s been searched for.
Searching Resources
As well as searching the forum, when you’ve got a question it’s worth looking to see if the information is already available in our documentation, guides, or other resources. These are quite spread out, so it can be difficult to know where to look for what.
This section provides a general overview, but a more thorough guide (and hopefully an advanced searching tool) will be coming in future. For now, each separate resource location has its own built in search functionality, accessed through either the top left or top right of the page.
| Resource | Usage |
|---|---|
| BR Website Product pages | Product descriptions, technical details, CAD models, relevant guides |
| BR Website Technical Reference | main product technical details (for comparison), CAD models, product documents, code library links, recommended software versions |
| BR Website Guides | Product usage, assembly, and modification guides |
| BR Website Resources | Programs, calculators, connector standard, and more |
| BR Website Distributors | Our distributors around the world, who often have their own products too! |
| BR Website Service Providers | Providers of various ROV and USV services from around the world |
| ardusub.com | (currently outdated) Documentation of the open-source software we develop/use (companion/ArduSub/QGroundControl), and developer docs/examples for external integrations (pymavlink, OpenCV, dvl, etc), including the Full ArduSub Parameter List, as well as hardware and connection overviews |
| ardupilot.org | Documentation for the general ArduPilot project, and other ArduPilot firmwares, including Attitude Controller docs |
| blueos.cloud/docs | Documentation for our BlueOS onboard computer software, and Cockpit control station software |
| docs.bluerobotics.com | Ping Viewer and Ping Protocol documentation, and ArduSub-4.1 |
| BR GitHub | Source code and issues tracking for BlueOS and Cockpit, our various sensor libraries, Ping Viewer, and our documentation |
| ArduPilot GitHub | ArduPilot/ArduSub source code and issues tracking |
| mavlink GitHub | Source code and issues tracking for the mavlink protocol and QGroundControl |
| mavlink.io | Documentation for the mavlink protocol, including the common and ardupilotmega message sets used by ArduSub |
Formatting a Post/Comment
Using Buttons
In Text (more options)
click for: text, headings, lists, hyperlinks, quotes, maths, code, diagrams, tables, spoilers, separator-lines, toggles
Jump to:
Text
**Bold** → Bold
*Italics* → Italics
~~strikethrough~~ → strikethrough
Headings
Start a line with # symbols followed by a space to make headings. One (# ) makes a main heading, two (## ) is a sub-heading, and so forth.
Lists
Bulleted
- lists
- sub-lists
- sub-sub-lists
- lists
- sub-lists
- sub-sub-lists
- sub-lists
Numbered
1. numbered lists
part of the list item
1. auto-numbering
stuff in between
5. start from desired number
- numbered lists
part of the list item - auto-numbering
stuff in between (separated by new lines)
- start from desired number
Checkboxes
[ ] unchecked
[x] black check on white fill
[X] white check on black fill
unchecked
black check on white fill
white check on black fill
HyperLinks
to a general webpage
[link text](url) → link text
to a pdf
PDFs can be linked to like normal webpages, but it’s worth noting that including #page=number at the end of the url will link to a specific page, e.g.
[link text](https://www.link/to/file.pdf#page=7)
to content/a video
Some content, including YouTube videos and some other video services, can be embedded directly. Instead of creating a named hyperlink to them, just paste the link on a new line - the output preview should give a sense of what the final result will look like.
to a heading in the thread
Set the link url to # followed by the heading id. The id is the heading in lower-case with dashes between words, followed by the number it is (e.g. the second heading in a given post/comment is number 2). You can also find the id by right clicking the heading and selecting “inspect”.
[Heading Name](#heading-name-N)
Quotes
Block quotes
> Block
> quotes
Block
quotes
Quoting with a specified source
Note: To quote part of a post, highlight it and press the “Quote” button that appears (see Quoting in a reply)
[quote="source (e.g. hyperlink)"]
quote
- text
[/quote]
Maths
We use MathJAX to provide maths support - it uses a similar syntax to LaTeX. You can right click on some formatted maths to show the underlying TeX commands.
Inline
Render $inline$ maths → Render inline maths
Block
$$
line\ breaks:\\
\begin{align}
maths &= x^{2t} + x_0 = 3\\
&= \frac{1}{2}\cos(\theta)
\end{align}
$$
Code
```nohighlight/language(e.g. python/c/arduino/...)/blank -> auto-detect language
code in the middle
```
code in the middle
Diagrams
We use Mermaid to provide diagram support - it’s a text-based syntax that allows describing the diagram to be generated, and automatically creates and positions the specified components.
```mermaid height=200
graph TD;
A --> B;
```
graph TD;
A --> B;
Tables
| Left | Center | Right |
|---|:---:|---:|
| content | can be *formatted* | **like normal** |
| Left | Center | Right |
|---|---|---|
| content | can be formatted | like normal |
Spoilers
Click to reveal: [spoiler] hidden text [/spoiler]
Click to reveal: hidden text
Separator Lines
above
---
below
above
below
Toggles
[details="name"]
information you want to fold down
[/details]
name
information you want to fold down
Tuning Notifications
Once you have a feel for how the forum works, you may decide you’d like to be notified when new content is added that you’re particularly interested in. Alternatively, you may wish to disable notifications temporarily at some point, or turn them off permanently.
Discourse (which powers the forum) provides a variety of notification settings, which can allow you to configure how you get notified on posts you’re active in, as well as signing up to notifications for particular categories or tags.
Notification Types
It’s possible to get (and configure) notifications for specific categories and tags, as well as notifications on particular posts. It’s also possible to set individual users as muted or ignored if you don’t want notifications of their posts, or don’t want to see their posts or comments at all.
click for a list of categories and tags that are likely to be of interest to most forum users
- Dive Log
- Build (you may wish to select specific sub-categories)
- General Discussion
- news
- guide
- vehicle-design
- poll
Accessing Notifications
click to toggle instructions for main notification settings
To access the notification settings, go to your preferences via your profile icon in the top right corner:
Then go to the Preferences tab, and select one of the relevant sections in the sidebar:
It’s also possible to access category and tag notification settings from the bell in the top right corner of their individual pages, and notification settings for a particular post are configurable underneath the last comment. To mute or ignore a particular user, go to their profile and change the “Normal” dropdown in the top right corner to “Muted” or “Ignored”.