Oystermaran

An oyster-basket-flipping robotic boat being developed in MIT’s Sea Grant Lab. I designed and manufactured PCBs and helped debug electronics for.

Fall 2024

I learned KiCAD and designed a simple PCB for Flippy to connect signals from the Pixhawk and Raspberry Pi, replacing the previous protoboard. I routed the traces by hand to ensure the PCB was one-sided, since we wanted to manufacture the PCB on-site. I learned how to use an Othermill, milled the PCB (several times, because I got it wrong a lot!), then soldermasked and soldered it.

Spring 2025

I helped debug the electronics system, allowing us to complete a test in Sea Grant’s tank.

I designed a mount to hold the Pixhawk, GPS, PCB, Raspberry Pi, battery terminals, and other electronics within a waterproof box. I lasercut the mount and other metal parts, on a Fablight.

I experimented with using an I2C breakout board from Adafruit to control servos, and designed yet another PCB that integrated the I2C breakout. We ordered them from PCBway; I soldered and installed one onto Flippy.