RASPBERRY PI

TRIDENT POWERED BY PI
News
The prototype of the Trident is not much
different from the finished design, with sleek
curves that allow it to fly through the water
payloads that can be mounted
on Trident, and as time goes on
we hope to develop software that
uses advanced control systems,
computer vision, and perhaps
even machine learning to give
Trident additional capabilities.
We’ve even been talking
about ways to use software for
autonomous operations.”
The machine certainly looks
impressive. Videos show it cuts
neatly and quickly through
the water, making sharp turns
on a whim (see more here:
magpi.cc/2baXRAf). It connects
to the surface via a tether for
better communication, using a
wireless buoy to then connect to
the controls. The tether can have a
range of up to 300 metres, although
the Trident shouldn’t be going any
deeper than 100 metres anyway.
“Trident is only one step in our
journey to popularise telerobotics
as a tool for exploration,” says
One of the main things we
like about Raspberry Pi
is its community
Eric. “As we develop technology
which will allow people to control
vehicles through the internet
and share data with thousands of
others, we hope that we can not
only change how many discoveries
about our planet are being made
each day, but also who the people
making those discoveries are.”
Find out more at openrov.com.
The bare-bones motherboard connects to the Raspberry Pi 3
at the front, which in turn controls much of the craft
MAKING AN OPEN-SOURCE ROV
“Since the beginning, a major cornerstone of our
company has been building community,” says Eric
Stackpole. “Although Trident and most of our other
hardware designs have chiefly been developed
internally, we’ve found that sharing our work tends
to create a stronger, more capable user base, and
we hope it will also fuel more innovation in the
field of low-cost underwater exploration. On the
software side of things, there are a ton of opensource
libraries and programs which we’ve used
or modified, and we hope that our software will
be useful to the community as well. We’ve put
literally thousands of hours into developing our
software and we want that to be a useful tool for
others.” You can see the team’s open-source work
on OpenROV‘s GitHub page: magpi.cc/2blGl9f.
An entrance into the SS Tahoe itself – watch
you don’t get the tether stuck, though
What’s beyond this long-unopened
door in the dark depths?
Someone needs to clean their bathroom;
no wonder the ship is abandoned
raspberrypi.org/magpi September 2016
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