Last weekend I found a website with a vast amount of 360 degree photo's taken aboard Well Enhancer from which I made this screenshot, the site is called Rig Tours. The stores are to be lowered by the gap between the ROV winches but these have been moved towards the center of the ship making the gap less then half the original width. That means that unless a pallet is so kind as to hang perfectly aligned it will not fit through here and considering the challenge of making the dive area crane turn far enough and the risk of it hitting the bridge will doing so I decided to drop the idea of loading the stores.
After having removed the stores related functions I then found this cute little crane added to the rear deck. I had seen it on a few photo's but even when it was visible it was not enough to make anything useful out of it until I found Rig Tours. Now I added the crane to the list of functions though I had to move the dive area crane to the function group Davits in order to make room and have all related crane accessible in the same function group.
This week 2 ESP32 S3 CAMS arrived including a 160 degree camera and after some 3 hours of programming (thanks to AI, couldn't have done it myself) the livestreams now work!! With the camera's now working I also tested with a 686 tugboat at what ranges I could spot other models though I tested this in my house with furniture in the background making it a worst case scenario but I was able to spot a head on 686 at over half a meter away in the overview and well over a meter when in the camera's own view which uses the entire grey area of the tab. That is somewhat limited since the situation where this is the most useful is when a model that small might not even be visible anymore behind my model making my camera's the only way to make any sense of the situation anymore. Therefor I decided that the bow camera doesn't need to be 160 degrees but rather 100 degrees will be perfectly fine.
The side camera's are not only intended to provide a good look at what is besides the model but also to see how the lifeboats are doing, especially when hoisting the lifeboats, I decided to make a temporary test setup to see whether the 160 degree cameras are actually up to here task and it turns out that I can even see the hyperbaric lifeboat when it's hanging in it's davit. I did decide to move the camera from against the wall beside the lifeboats to the edge of the superstructure to avoid the view being blocked by the forward lifeboat and having proper view at the lifeboats in the water which is very useful to judge when to lower the hooks on the lifeboat though I'd then need to switch tabs since that button is on another tab. This leaves some room for improvement, perhaps I'll add the hook buttons to the correct camera views.
Considering that I transferring back to controlling the model through 2,4GHz nRF24 transceivers is has now become necessary to be able to select a channel. That also creates the need to see what channel is actually selected and this 3digit display those that very well and seems to be readable at distance so I can easily read it when I try to select the channel in the boat. Due to the differences in protocol between my transceivers and standard transmitters makes it vitually impossible to interfere with one another and this is made completely impossible because standard transmitters hop between different channels to communicate with the least possible noise and other interference which means that they will skip my channel as it sends propulsion commands 50x per second and telemetry comes back 20x per second making it quite a busy channel. The channel selected by the WiFi will also be quite busy when the camera's are streaming and thus this channel will be avoided as well. In order to save bandwidth I'm making buttons to make the livestream per camera active and inactive, take a photo at the camera's full resolution and record video and zoom in by cropping the image to a selected center (click on the screen determines the centerpoint for the zoomed in image) while photo's and video recordings are saved to the ESP's SD card which can later be downloaded via WiFi.
At the moment I tend to concentrate on finishing the transmitter first considering that it's fysically almost finished and could possibly take about a week to complete. That is also helped by now being almost finished with programming the transmitter, I only need to make the camera control buttons (zoom, record, take photo and livestream) working properly (like 75% done now) and then make all commands go through the Python program that also controls the joysticks and have that sort out whether to use the nRF24's or WiFi when the nRF's are not available and sort out the adressing of all boats and other devices. For completing the transmitter I am somewhat relying on the new PCB's for the 15 joysticks arriving in time, these are in my country so it doesn't need to be a problem. I have now also received a magnetic connector to electrically connect the add-on and main transmitter to replace the not always properly connecting VGA connectors which then also makes it quite appealing to replace the wiring in the add-on so I can clean up the mess I made of the wiring there.
Greetings Josse
