Microcontroller board under water

International Scandinavia
1

Hey!

We are a couple of guys studying our last year in high school in Helsingborg, Sweden. At the moment we are having a project in school where we try to develop a lobster trap. Inside this lobster trap we have a camera, microswitch, and lights to help the camera to take a photo due to the dark light at the bottom of the sea. After the picture have been taken it is supposed to go through a GPRS-transmitter to send the picture to a receiver, in this case a cellphone.

So the big problem we have at the moment is that we need a microcontroller board to control and send out the right signals to all the parts so that this can be possible. This microcontroller board needs to be able to function with the camera, the GPRS-transmitter, the lights and the switch. We searched and found your website very informative and thought that you could help us. We apriciate all help we can get. If you got any further question please post back questions and we will do our best to answer them.

This is the parts we have:

Lights:
http://www.ekolampan.se/strip-light-led-pa-rulle/led-flexibelt-band-24w-12vdc-3528-vattentat.html

Camera:
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10061

GPRS-transmitter:

Thanks a lot in advance.

Best regards
Minh-Vuong Pham

2

This scandinavian forum is mostly for people who want to read/write in scandinavian, rather than english. It is not for projects that happen to be in scandinavia. I'll reply in English this time, but the language should switch to Swedish or similar (Jag pratar Svenska, men skriver Dansk). Otherwise ask again in the apropiate area (Projects) and answer here that you have moved it.

The electrical challenges are (1) a water tight box. (2) I do not think the GPRS signals will travel at all in the water.

You probably have a bouy marking your trap anyhow, so I suggest putting the watertight box with the smart electronics (Arduino, GPRS) on the bouy. This means you need a cable with enough wires insde to coer light, camera release and switch.

Other challenges: The camera needs a serial port and so does the GPRS. So SoftSerial for a standard Arduino or one of the extra Serial ports on a Mega to communicate with both. I hope the camera will wait patiently while you pipe the serial picture stream up the GPRS link - the picture will be larger that the RAM available. May include a SD drive instead to store pictures and just send a "got a picture!" on the GPRS?

Good luck - sounds a fun project