I need to write a final report for the MaSCOT project during 2016. I thought drafting the report as a series of blog posts would kill two birds with one stone… This is an introduction the Marinized Stereo Camera Operational Testbed (MaSCOT), an internal R&D project supported by the APL Science and Engineering Group (SEG). The project had multiple goals: to procure one or more stereo vision cameras and package them for shallow-water underwater testing; to any sort of machine vision camera at all for use underwater (which is mostly redundant with one); and to support my serious engagement with at least one Open Source SLAM program – there is such a diversity of code available, I felt it was better to incrementally improve and existing codebase than start from scratch.

[Apologies that this is the first post about MaSCOT. I’ll try to keep up a development blog and backfill with add’l project notes and resources. Maybe.] The full MaSCOT system has been assembled and is ready for tank testing. I ran the sealed system on the desktop for the first time last night. While it was on I recorder internal air temperatures using the Bosch BMP280on the companion board, plus the Linux ACPI temperature values.