acronyms

Acronyms

Here you can find a list of common acronyms used on the team, be they made by us or something technical with widespread use.

Acronym	Words	Description
ROV	Remotely Operated underwater Vehicle	A type of robot for performs underwater tasks.
IEEE	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers	The student organization ROV is a part of.
MATE	Marine Advanced Technology Education	The non-profit organization that runs the competition.
HKN	Heta Kappa Nu	The ECE honor society. The have a lounge and lab located near us in EE.
PM	Primary Manipulator	The main ~~claw~~ manipulator used on the ROV. Designed in the PM.
AM	Auxiliary Manipulator	The secondary manipulator used on the ROV. Designed in the early AM.
PCB	Printed Circuit Board	A piece of fiberglass with copper, soldermask, and silkscreen to attach components to.
SMT	Surface Mount Technology	A component soldered to a PCB with pads, opposed to through holes.
CAD	Computed Aided Design	Tools for creating a design on a computer. You many here MCAD and ECAD for Mechanical and Electrical.
CAM	CAM	CAM.
CNC	CNC	CNC.
ROS	Robot Operating System	Not technical an OS, but a network for communication in a robot.
Git	-	A version control system for software. Not technically an acronym, though the creator Linus Torvalds has suggested several interpretations.
PoE	Power Over Ethernet	The several ethernet standards that transmit 48V DC power over the unused (4,5,7,8) or used pairs (1,2,3,6) in ethernet.
PoEoB	Power Over Ethernet Over Binder	Using an 8 pin binder cable to run PoE.
BWEAP	Binder with Ethernet and Power	Using an 8 pin binder to send 2 ethernet pairs and 5V and GND on the other 4 wires. It uses an easily available voltage and avoids additional conversion at the receiving end.
IC	Integrated Circuit	Any electrical component with transistors solder to a PCB. These can be gate drivers, microcontrollers, etc.
SPI	Serial Peripheral Interface	A communication protocol for ICs. It requires at least 4 wires, but it fast and straightforward.
UART	Univeral Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter	A communication protocol for ICs. No clock signal is needed (hence Asynchronous). Common in UART to USB converters for simple devices (like an Arduino) to communicate with a computer.
I²C	Inter-Integrated Circuit	A two wire bus based communication protocol that uses pull-up resistors to support multiple slave devices and masters too. All devices have a 7 bit address in standard I²C.
SMBus & PMBus	System- and Power Management Bus	Basically a subset of I²C with a defined set of commands and extra bells and whistles. See I²C for more detail.
CAN	Controller Area Network	A differential, asynchronous bus based communication protocol developed in the automotive industry for communication between micro controllers.
USB	Universal Serial Bus	A differential pair communication protocol (not truly a bus) for fast communication.
PWM	Pulse Width Modulation	A "square wave" of a fixed or varying duty cycle.
DC	Direct Current	Current (and voltages) that maintain a fixed value and don't varying with time.
AC	Alternating Current	Current (and voltages) that alternate between positive and negative with time, generally in a sinusoid.
BLDC	BrushLess Direct Current (Motor)	A type of motor (really a PMAC motor) that can be driven from a DC source with an ESC.
PMAC	Permanent Magnet Alternating Current (motor)	A motor with magnets on the rotor (rotating part) and windings on the stator (stationary part) to create torque and rotation.
ESC	Electronic Speed Controller	An electrical device for driving BLDC motors. It produces special three phase PWM power which mimics the 3 phase sine power needed to drive them.
BJT	Bipolar Junction Transistor	A type of transistor. Analysis models it as current based.
NPN & PNP	Negative and Positive	The two variants of BJTs.
MOSFET	Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor	A transistor type. These tend to be more common. N-MOS or N-FET and P- are the two common variants.
LDO	Low DropOut (regulator)	A type of linear regulator with a very low dropout voltage (the amount the input must be above the output).
SBC	Single Board Computer	Products like a Raspberry Pi which are full fledged computers, but with lower specs and small form factors.
MPEG	Moving Picture Experts Group	A camera stream format.
FFMPEG	Fast Forward MPEG	A program that streams videos.
IPC	Inter-Process Communication	--