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River Rover (Floating Netduino with Communication)


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#1 n_yohan

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Posted 02 October 2011 - 01:45 AM

I love to watch documentaries, especially documentaries about space. I have watched a few on the mars rovers and one on the Phoenix Mars mission. The fact that these vehicles can communicate with earth via an orbiting martian satellite and vise versa blows my mind. I think it would be really really fun to build a project that could do something much more basic but similar. The idea that I came up with was to set something afloat on a local river that could communicate it's position to me. My first idea was perhaps to use an older windows based smart phone and a Verizon pay as you go plan. I thought maybe I could write a program for the phone that would access it's GPS and upload it to a server. If this did work it would be pretty cheap as the phone can be had on ebay for $30 - $40. I then realized that there would be some issues. I picked Verizon as a carrier because they have the best coverage but I believe that their phones lock out the gps from being accessed by third party programs because they want you to pay for their street map software. Also ideally the device would turn on, get a GPS reading, make sure that it had a signal, send the info, and go back to sleep. Repeating every hour or so. Using just a phone I see no way to make the phone turn itself on and off. If it stays on all the time I would be lucky to get three days out of it before the batteries went dead. So I then had an idea to solve these problems. I thought that I could use something such as the netduino to turn the phone on and off. My hope is that the netduino can use a battery to stay running for much longer than 3 days. I also thought that it might be possible to use a solar charger for the netduino. The problem still exists as to how to receive a gps signal from the phone. Perhaps I could use a gps module for the netduino but then how would I communicate the information to the phone to send it? I then thought that if the netduino is getting the gps signal then perhaps a windows based smart phone is not necessary. Maybe I could use a boost mobile or some other cheap pay as you go phone. But still how would I send the information? Perhaps I could wire up all of the phones buttons and program the netduino to activate the correct key presses in order to send a text message or something like that. So as you can see I have what I think is a really fun idea for a project but the details still need a lot of ironing out. The minimum requirement would be that the "River Rover" could: 1. Retrieve it's GPS location (some of the time). 2. Electronically send this information (some of the time). 3. Have enough battery power to survive for a least a week. The extras would be: 1. Tell me the temperature 2. Tell me if water has leaked in. 3. Listen to commands that I put on a server such as "SLEEP 24" (You are stuck so sleep for a day while we wait for heavy rain that may dislodge you). 4. Monitor and report the charge on the batteries. 5. Be able to use solar power to charge all of the electronics on board. 6. 5. A low res camera. I do realize that I most likely will never see the electronics again, unless of course if gets stuck a mile or two down river and keeps reporting the same location. Even then it might be really hard to get to. But I do plan on enclosing a laminated card with my information in the rare event that it is found by a kind person. This project sounds like so much fun to me and I am really enthusiastic about it. I'm a professional computer programmer and a novice electronics hobbyist. I certainly need help with this. I would appreciate your thoughts and ideas. Thanks, n_yohan

#2 Robert L.

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Posted 02 October 2011 - 11:48 AM



The minimum requirement would be that the "River Rover" could:
1. Retrieve it's GPS location (some of the time).
2. Electronically send this information (some of the time).
3. Have enough battery power to survive for a least a week.

The extras would be:
1. Tell me the temperature
2. Tell me if water has leaked in.
3. Listen to commands that I put on a server such as "SLEEP 24" (You are stuck so sleep for a day while we wait for heavy rain that may dislodge you).
4. Monitor and report the charge on the batteries.
5. Be able to use solar power to charge all of the electronics on board.
6. 5. A low res camera.

I do realize that I most likely will never see the electronics again, unless of course if gets stuck a mile or two down river and keeps reporting the same location. Even then it might be really hard to get to. But I do plan on enclosing a laminated card with my information in the rare event that it is found by a kind person.

This project sounds like so much fun to me and I am really enthusiastic about it. I'm a professional computer programmer and a novice electronics hobbyist. I certainly need help with this. I would appreciate your thoughts and ideas.

Thanks,

n_yohan



I developed something with your minimum features. I used a DROID-X phone and programed it with App Inventor. It would turn on the GPS, wait for the position to be determined, take a GPS reading, turn off the GPS and then send it to a server at programmed intervals. Between intervals it would pause. Using a standard battery, it would run for about 24 hours. I think a larger battery could keep it running much longer, especially if you used something external, like a small 12 volt to continuously recharge the phone. It was connected using Verizon's network. My application was to track a person's position, for example a hiker.

When I did this, app inventor did not yet support the taking of pictures, but perhaps that has since been added. It would also not be able to support the other sensors you wanted.

The droid-x is still pricey, but I expect that to change now that the droid-3 is out. The best price I could find on ebay for a Droid-x was $50

#3 Chris Seto

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Posted 02 October 2011 - 02:34 PM

1. Tell me the temperature
Easy, check out Dallas's OneWire temp sensors
2. Tell me if water has leaked in.
Again, easy. See if SFE has some water level sensors
3. Listen to commands that I put on a server such as "SLEEP 24" (You are stuck so sleep for a day while we wait for heavy rain that may dislodge you).
4. Monitor and report the charge on the batteries.
Voltage divider and ADC port are all that's needed for that
5. Be able to use solar power to charge all of the electronics on board.
This might be kind of troublesome
6. 5. A low res camera.
I don't have much experience with serial cameras, but I think Linksprite makes one.


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#4 n_yohan

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Posted 08 October 2011 - 04:55 AM

Thank you for the replies! I have been doing some more research and it looks like one possible solution for the communication would be SMS using AT Commands. I could use a USB host shield to send AT commands to the phone. This would allow me to both read text messages and send them. It seems like a good cheap way to send information back and forth except that I can't get a phone to respond to the SMS portion of the AT Command set. We happen to have two cell phones laying around that we no longer use. After hooking both of them up to a laptop I used hyper terminal to start blasting AT commands at them and both responded here an there. The one command that I really thought was cool was that command that asks for the current battery status. I can see that being good to know as the phone battery nears end of life. It will be no surprise when it stops sending messages. The mars rovers let NASA know their battery levels as well. :) When I start giving them the SMS commands I just get "error". It is well documented that phones only support a subset of the available AT commands and each phone can be different but what isn't well documented is what AT commands any individual phone supports. This is frustrating because I would like to use a cheap phone with great battery life and a very small screen (so as to not drain much of the battery on a screen that no one can see). I also thought that I would experiment with disconnecting the screen and trying the phone that way. I am going to keep researching this. If I could get a phone that I already have working with SMS it would really cut down on the final cost of the project. My Motorola i425 seems like the best candidate. Any comments are welcomed and appreciated.




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