Troubleshooting

Loose End Caps
End caps that don't fit correctly can cause a catastrophic failure of the electronics tube and everything inside. It's important to always be monitoring the fit of the O-rings. If the endcaps aren't sealing tightly, use Teflon (PTFE) plumbers tape to make a few wraps around the O-ring channel to increase the diameter of the endcap, until the O-ring seals snugly against the tube. A video/pictures of this method will be posted shortly

Camera
section is out of date, will be updated If the HD-5000 webcam autofocus is a problem, it can be disabled and manually set with the v4l2 command line tool uvcdyntrl

Install the app on the beaglebone (with ubuntu image)

After it's installed, the autofocus can be disabled with:

Focal length can be manually set with

where $amt is a value between 0 and 40. 0 sets the distance at infinity. 40 sets the distance at about 5cm.

Serial connection to Arduino
section is out of date will be updated To enable the the serial connection between beagleBone and Arduino, you need to set the GPIO mux correctly.

For reference check out: http://www.jerome-bernard.com/blog/2012/06/04/beaglebone-serial-ports-and-xbees/

To enable the reset circuit (to reset the Arduino chip, for example to program it with a new version of the Arduino code), you need to setup the GPIO6 (pin 3 on jumper P8) to make it output HIGH (5V).

This is put in scripts over at my (@codewithpassion) GitHub branch: https://github.com/codewithpassion/openrov-software/tree/gpio-and-serial/linux. Hopefully this will be merged to the official branch.