In shop this week, I spent a good amount of time helping my friends with their own projects. I spent time helping Tim get his blog website completely overhauled. Ultimately Andrew and I convinced him to use Hugo which is far superior in every way to Wordpress. There was some trouble figuring out how to deploy his site to vercel (we never got it fully deployed) so for this week at least, he will continue to put his blog posts on his old website at https://timmyhunt.

First blog of the new school year! Being the first few days back in the shop, there were a few chores and tasks that had to be completed before anything else. Over the summer, Mr. Christy purchased a whole new assortment of parts and chips that needed to be sorted. Once this was finished, I jumped right back into things- right where we left off. The golf cart has a new charger that I was able to install this week, reducing charging time drastically.

This week, I spent most of shop time working with the golf cart. The new battery arrived so we put it in place, and we gave it a quick test-drive even though not all batteries were balanced yet. We finally charged all batteries and got them to each be within 0.2 volts of each other which will allow us to connect the equalizer modules. Hopefully this will prevent us from ruining another 300 dollar lead acid battery!

I had less shop-time this week than normal. On Tuesday, my entire Spanish class had to take the AAPL proficiency test, which ended up eating all of my fifth period and over half of my sixth period that would normally have been spent in shop working. On Monday, we were scheduled to take the exam during sixth period, after our health class, but it ultimately ended up getting canceled half-way through.

This week involved an assortment of work on various projects. With the seniors gone, the entire school felt a lot quieter. Luckily, I inherited one of the best spec. PCs in the shop from one of the seniors which will be great for when I get to working on the golf-cart’s AI autonomy system! I’m working on dual-booting it with Linux + Windows 11. I also printed and installed the new dashboard panel for the golf cart which will display statistics regarding battery level, range, voltage, and alerts.

This week, I continued working on the Sumo Bot project. I re-printed the frame and milled another PCB, then soldered all the components together. We will be making two robots for the competition. Likely, the bot will be ready to test and debug early next week. Although in the process of printing, I noticed that one of the Fusion 3s wasn’t working. Will graciously fixed the jammed extruder on the printer, but it was still having unexpected difficulty when homing the Y axis.

This week, I made a major software breakthrough on the ROV. The IMU will periodically return invalid data, likely due to a faulty sensor. Due to the lack of error handling in the code, the ROV would receive a null value and the enire software system responsible for the control of the ROV would crash and need to be restarted. This bug that I’ve been tracking for nearly a month now was resolved by simply implenting some basic catches to detect when these null bits come in, and simply ignore them.

This week, Tim finished his electronics skeleton that he has been working on for the past few weeks. It looks very nice and is completely custom designed, machined, and resin printed. I helped him install it into the ROV, and I can already tell that it will make things significantly easier in terms of debugging and also performance of the overall machine. The previous layout consisted of floppy acrylic fingers that held the PCBs in place.

The first 2 days of shop this week were spent replacing XT30 connectors on the ROV’s power distribution board. There have been connection issues in the past, and I really didn’t want this to factor into existing reliability issues. On Wednesday, Jonas Wirz and I got the ROV into the pool, however, we had some free time before then and were very productive with it. Short-lived gated off area exploration (right).

This week I locked in and spent a good chunk of time identifying the reasoning behind the mysterious crashing phenomenon we have been experiencing for over a year and a half in the ROV. Raspberry Pi 5 Problems In the past, the main control computer (RPi 5) was experiencing power interruption issues due to the massive current draw of the 8 thrusters. Because of the low dropout voltage in the 5 volt regulator, we found that adding some capacitange along these output lines helped smooth out any wild ripples.