Over the course of roughly a year, after completing my first book, I resurrected an old pet project of building an autonomous submarine (referred to as the E-2 project) with certain fairly challenging functionality requirements. In the course of developing this idea, I spent many hours on the Internet and elsewhere, researching techniques for rapid development of various electromechanical control systems and platforms to run fairly complex signal-processing algorithms. Although there are, of course, thousands of useful projects and snippets of information to be obtained from the Internet and books on hobbyist robotics, I found that nobody else seemed to have my exact priorities.