This week the shop flooded. With all of the weather we have been having, a drain outside clogged, and a bunch of water came in through the garage door. This basically killed all productivity for wednesday, but the week wasn’t too bad. This week I did the first test of the piston action inside the tube, which was fairly sucessful, with some minor hiccups. This week was all about getting the piston to be tested, which meant attaching the nut, and nutplate.

This week was quite productive for such a short week. I had two main projects, the battery holder, and the motor holder. Both of these were things that I already had done the design work for, I just now needed to print everything out and bolt it together. The Battery holder is what I tackled first. I all of this stuff done for about a week, but the main problem was that the 3d printers are incredibly unreliable, and failed 5 times on the print.

This week I machined the Piston for the float. The first step was to cut the stock I was going to use, I used about 3.5" of stock, as I needed material to hang on to, and some lee way to approach the final dimensions. The Next steps were on the lathe. I first faced the front to give myself a good z reference face. Then I faced the outside Diameter to dimension.

This week was less productive, just because there was less to do. It was mainly taken up by refining the battery holder that one of the softmores made. This mattery holder is supposed to hold all of the batteries in a circle, in order to use the space more efficiently. This has proven to be a significant design challenge, as I had already taken a stab at it, but we gave the project away before I could finish it.

This week I finally got the CFD software to play nice with the new ROV model. to do this I simply just took out all of the hardware in the model, as it was just to much for the CFD software to handle. With this simplified the simulation was able to run over the weekend… if my computer didn’t lock itself. I had set it to not sleep, but forgot to set it to not lock.

This week the auger in the fish feeder broke. This meant I needed to fix it majorly, and not just reprint the auger. We eventually settled on reducing the length of the auger, by adding a bend in the pipe. This effctively reduces the torque on the auger as it doesn’t have to be as long. Another measure I took to reduce the torque was to increase the diameter of the auger, as bits of fishfood were getting caught inbetween the auger blades and the inside of the pipe.

This week I had to put the piston on the back burner, as I needed to wait for the O-rings to arrive. This meant that I was able to focus on something else for a little bit. I started assembling the battery holder which turned out to be a lot more difficult that I expected. The Formlabs Form 3+ resin printers that the shop has are bullet proof about 97% of the time, however that 3% of the time they are very very frustrating to work with and fix.

Now that my parts have arived I can get back to working directly on the float. At the end of last week the tubes came in that will serve as the main float body. I then tested to see if they fit with the old piston and top cap, which they unfortunatly do not at all. These tubes are significatnly smaller in their inner (and probably outer, although that doesn’t really matter to us) diamter than the old tube.

This week I learned how to use the lathe. This is because I was waiting on parts to arrive, which they now have, in perfect timing so I can start the next phase of the float. So in this little down time in the float project I decided to do this as I will also need it later on in the project, to turn the aluminum piston. I started this project by quickly and simply modeling the ring in CAD, and then printing out a drawing of the part that would be used in the machining phase.

With our nice four day week, I continued to design the intricate systems on the float, with the main focus on the Battery Holder. This brick of plastic is designed to hold 8 AA batteries. Last year we used off the shelf battery holders, which were nice and easy, especially since we were in a time crunch, however they were not very space effecient. This year we are going a different route.

This week I fully focused on the float, and particulary the anti rotation rods. I have been trying to figue out what material to use for them fou a couple weeks now, but this is the first week where I have made it a goal, and not an overarching requirement. This is much easier said than done. Last week we diecided that it wasn’t worth the time and effort to use piping to hide the wires, which is a bit sad, but also makes my life so much easier.

This past week has been rough as it’s our first almost full week back in shop and it is fairly hot with super high humidity to go along with it. In the shop I have been primarily working on the fish feeder for the biotech shop here in the voc. I have also been working on this website which has been pretty frustrating and rewarding. The fish feeder was originally built by students before my time, and its main purpose is to feed the fish that the biotech shop has automatically.

This was the first full week in school that we had, and we definitely felt it. The humidity has been down significantly the past couple of days which was quite nice. This week I was taken off of the fish feeder repairs to work on the Float with Scott Campell which I will probably be doing for the next school year, and the fish feeder was thus handed off to Sacha Silva.