Sponsors

NAVSEA is our primary sponsor and main source of funding, they have been with us from the beginning! The engineers that work there are also a great source of knowledge and experience.

As described by their website:

"We engineer, build, buy and maintain ships, submarines and combat systems that meet the Fleet's current and future operational requirements."

Digilent has been a long-time sponsor of our club, donating microcontroller and FPGA boards, various electronic tools, and engineering advice. Most recently, Digilent has donated a Zybo board to us. We are working on using this Zynq-based board to process our hydrophone data so that we can perform rough localization in the water.

"Digilent's mission is to make electrical engineering and design technologies understandable and accessible to all, by enabling educators and students with high-value, industry-relevant educational tools and curriculum."

We have been using NoMachine for several years to remotely access the computer on our submarine. We are very excited to announce that we are now officially sponsored by NoMachine!

NoMachine Workstation for Linux lets you connect to the remote computer and run multiple virtual Linux desktops, ideal for individual users or small groups which share access to applications running on the remote host.

We use NoMachine Workstation to run graphical applications such as our control helm and vision processing interface on the submarine while it is underwater. Without it, we would have to modify our applications to work remotely. With NoMachine's Workstation, we can run the applications directly on the submarine. It is powerful, yet very easy to use. With our sponsorship, we now can have our entire team connect to our sub at the same time!

We have exclusively used OSH Park for PCB fabrication for the last three years and are proud to now be officially sponsored by them!

We love OSH Park because of their fast return time, high quality boards, and competitive prices. Their average return time is 12 days, which is great for rapid prototyping. These are very nice boards with a gold finish on all contacts, which makes soldering easy. The boards are also tolerant of rework; we've never lifted a pad despite doing tons of resoldering (our fault for needing to do rework, not OSH Park). We like to use their standard 2-layer board service which costs $5/in². However, this gives us 3 copies of our design, resulting in a price of $1.67/in² per board. Coupled with their free shipping, it's a hard price to beat!

MATLAB is an essential tool in many an engineer's toolbox, and Robosub is no exception! We like to use MATLAB for analyzing sensor data, developing models, and for working with our control system.

CircuitLab is an in-browser schematic capture and circuit simulation software tool to help you rapidly design and analyze analog and digital electronics systems.

CircuitLab has been particularly useful for designing and simulating our hydrophone circuits. The schematic editor is fast and easy to use, with an intuitive simulation interface as well. The web-based design allows us to easily work from any computer, no installation necessary!