Robotics & Engineering - Week of 02/03/25
This week was a bit funky. Not only did I have limited time in shop, but limited time in school overall!
Our school had a half-day on Wednesday (we get released at noon) and the day after was a snow day.
Because of these two things, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to work on roboticy things.
Nonetheless, my friends and I ended up getting some work done on the ROV on the days we did have.
Upon returning from the weekend, on Monday, we found that the leak in the ROV had not magically fixed itself as we had hoped. This ultimately led us to taking apart everything once again to diagnose each part separately to conclude if things were water-tight individually.
We figured it out eventually. Apparently one of the wet-link penetrators for the cable was not secured properly leading to a slow leak.
After we fixed that, we wanted to get it into the pool as quickly as possible.
On Tuesday, I worked with Jonas on getting some MATE ROV props constructed out of PVC. We did a good chunk of the assembly, but we are waiting for some more connectors to arrive in the mail for the pipes. Then, we’ll have a full reconstruction of the props the MATE ROV competition will have to offer us!
After finishing the props, I worked on some of the software for the ROV. I’m not supposed to be in charge of the software of our robot, but I find myself changing and fixing it more than anybody else in the shop.
The next day, I had under an hour in the shop. During this time, I worked on writing some code for Tim’s science project that involves collecting hydrodynamics data. I talked about this more in a previous blog post.
After school on Wednesday, we brought the ROV up to the pool to do some testing. No leaks!
Although we didn’t see any water getting inside during our lengthy tests, the ROV was still exhibiting some of it’s past issues that I thought I had fixed. This included RPi shutoff randomly (both Pi 5 and Pi 4 exhibited this behavior) and also slow boot time.
Even though there were still issues, I had fun watching our hard work swim around in the water.
Thanks to the fixed electric golfcart, we managed to carry the ROV down the hill and back to the shop around the back of our school.
Even though it was a little sketchy, with Aaron the sole force keeping it from tumbling onto very cold, hard pavement, it worked out and was a lot more fun than taking the elevator. That's all that really matters anyways.
Once we made it back to the shop, it was pretty late, and we all headed home. Thank you Mr. Christy for staying after school once again!
Thursday, it "snowed" and a snow-day was wasted. During this time, I was able to work on some HAM radio related projects that I haven't had the time to focus on. This also included studying for my General class license, which I don't need, but I think it would be nice to have more HF options. I also constructed a prototype repeater out of an SDR and my UV5R, which worked. When I get the time, I plan on making a more sophisticated version to be mounted on my high school.
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