A Working Filter Actuator

It may have taken a week and an unwieldy hardware solution, but I now have an operational filter actuator.  hooray

The transistors I tried just simply could not supply enough current in series to the solenoid when biased by the 3.3V digital output of a GPIO pin, so I threw together a servo-operated switch that flicks the filters back and forth pretty reliably.  I've been testing the switch and actuator by setting the scripts that operate them on an infinite loop (see video) and after a couple of solder joint breaks and design revisions the assembly finally seems to be straightened out.

In the meantime, I have continued working on the startup scripts. Of course I have scripts operating both lights and the actuator, and I am integrating them all into a sort of pre-mission check to verify functionality.  I have managed to take images using both the IR and visible light filters, and the pictures look good.  All that remains before the real hard part of this project is camera scripting and LiDAR integration, which I anticipate will not take too much time.

Edit: After much thought, there is a good reason that the transistors did not work.  I'm not covering it in depth here (because you don't even know what that circuit looks like), but in essence a relatively high load voltage pushes back on the weak 3.3V GPIO driven base current.  This created a negative feedback loop that dropped most of my voltage across the transistors in series with the load.  I have no plans to revise my design armed with this knowledge, I'm sure an electrical engineer would look at it for 2 seconds and say: "Jacob you dumb idiot you should have just built this instead..." but an electrical engineer I am not.  I plan on devoting no more time to the filter actuator, as it is an auxiliary component to this project, it works right now, and it has gobbled up enough of my valuable time already.