This week I kept working on the Brackets for the linear actuator, which hasn’t really had any setbacks. Unfortunatly parallel to that when we were adding the box for the control board on the working golfcart, something that I had a softmore whip up, the capacitors on the board exploded quite spectacularly. This was mainly because the power was plugged in backwards, which wasn’t without reason but with most of the reason being that I’m stupid.

This week we truely got started on the braking on the golf cart. We started off the week getting some numbers on the braking force. This was quite entertaining as it basically entailed us driving the golf cart and slamming on the brake as hard as we can, while there is a bathroom scale on the pedal. From this I gathered that I would really prioritize speed of the actuator over force.

This week was a very good week. I finished up the mechanical assembly for the steering control, aswell as making good progresson tidying up the working golfcarts other retrofits. This chain length was unfotunatly right in the middle of a link, which means I had to go and get a half link from metal fab. Now it works perfectly Another major issue with the golfcart was the fact that there was exposed high voltage, and wires running through the passenger compartment.

This week was all about fitting the Hub onto the Shaft which was completely achieved. I started by trying to file it down, which worked to an extent, but eventually it was just going way to slow. What I ended up doing is bringing the dremel outside and hogging off the rest of the material. This worked really well, and made it so that I was able to slide the thing most of the way over the splines, with some small amounts of bashing, and wedging with a screw driver.

This Week I figured out a few more things on the drivetrain side, like ordering sprockets, and also I bent acrylic. I did this to make a mock up of the motor holder I am going to bend out of steel for the final one. This was also a bit of a strength test, and the bend was able to hold the full weight of the motor, but Id be wary about its ablity to hold it with the motor running and pulling on the steering column.

This week was a welcome break from the Pillow block that has given me much trouble. I started this week by starting the actual construction of the Motor Holder. I did this by cutting out the flat pattern on the water jet, and bringing the peices upstairs to the Metal Fab shop, who welded it up. These welds are glorious. Next it was time to figure out how to do the sprocket stuff.

This week is when the Pillow block started to really pick up speed. On friday I used the tormach to mill the profile of the pillow block, which was very sucessful for my first time using the cnc funtion of the mill. This is mid cut in the tormach. This was the only part of the process I did on the CNC machines as it was the only part that had somewhat complicated geometry after that I now had to remove it from the stock.

This week I started on the pillow block. Origionally I wanted to just buy one, and slap it in there on the angle and call it a day. The slight issue with this, is that I’m a little bit dumb and thought that all of the ones of the right size dont fit, and thought that It would be easier to just machine my own with a plain bearing. I then realized that the off the shelf one would actually fit.

This week I started the real work on the golf cart, and there are some major updates on the design of the steering subsystem. First of all, Mr. Jackson from metal fabrication came down, and he gave me advice on how to do all of the physical driving parts of the steering, as he has lots of experience with this. He had some really good ideas that I will definitly be using.

Its the first week of senior year, and so far its going pretty well. This year I am going to be working on the autonomous golfcart that Roman got working last year. Although it was working, he only got the throttle to be automously controlable. This year I am going to try to get the steering to be autonmously controllable. This is what I have been working on the past week.

This week I kept working on building the new float. I got all of the mechanical aspects taken care of, which includes the piston, and the top cap, as well as the whole tube. This just leaves us to go onto the electronics portion of the build. Honestly this week has been pretty boring in terms of blog post content, as i’m really just putting together stuff that I designed months ago which is still pretty cool, as it still fits and works well, but not the most interesting processes or design challenges at the moment.

This week I continued to work on building the new float, as well as teaching the silly freshman how to floats work. I drilled and tapped the holes in the new piston, which actually didn’t go terribly. I also finally finished up all of the acrylic welding. The other thing that I have been working on is getting Stable Diffusion working on the new computers. I got it working pretty well on Tuesday, with the Automatic1111 webui.

Monday # Lamination Station # As part of our new upgraded float, we will be making an upgraded Nut Plate. This will be heavily upgaded for strength, as the nut will be bolted on instead, due to an unfortunate failure at regionals the Epoxy joint will not cut it anymore. This means that the joint will be strengthened, and the weakest link would most likely be the bond between the tube and the Nut plate.

This week I continued working on the locking mechanism, and assembling it for pool testing, which we did yesterday. All of the new parts are working great, but I had to reprint the reciever side of the tool, because of the bolts being in the way of the locking pin. This extended the time that it took to do this, which was quite annoying, but it is done now so i’m not complaining.

This week was actually two weeks, as we also spent april vacation in the shop. During this time we got the float to finally reliably profile (ish). It is not entirely air tight causing the top to pop of after sitting for awhile at vaccum and then profiling. This is because the vaccum is lost, which then when profiled induces positive preasure, which the float is not designed to handle. For the time being we fixed this issue by being more mindful of this, and removing the stopper when it sits for long periods of time forcing us to redo the vaccum, and also by wrapping the intersection of the top cap and tube in electrical tape.

Today was another shortend week, but I kept going with my propeller. This week so far I figured out how to do a rotating region analysis, which is how you are actually supposed to do these sorts of simulations. Instead of rotating the actual propeller geometry, it rotates a set region of the water around the prop. I have no idea why they do this, but they do. This is the demo rotating region analysis from Autodesk, the red is the fluid that is being rotated around the geometry being tested.

This week was pretty slow, as we were once again unable to make it into the pool. I dove back into CFD trying to analyse and optimize a propeller. During my research into this subject, I found a pretty good youtube video on the subject, that showed me what I need to find to find the optimal propeller. These numbers I can then find using CFD analysis. I also wanted to do this with a spinning propeller, in order to give it the most amount of realism.

This week was mainly fixing mistakes that were made last week, and last year. Last week the magnet holders decided to be a little goofy and set us back about a week, so i decided they needed a redesign. Instead of using the threaded inserts and set screws, I decided to use a clamping mechanism, and a captured nut. This will aleviate thesignle point of stress on the tube, and give us a much more even clamping force.

This week was very disapointing. It started very good, but we were unfortunatly unable to get into the pool due to the webclient being annoying, and to add insult to injury, the whole tube cracked. This means that we will have to create a whole new tube, which will happen today. This really sucks. On the topic of the wings, I have selected the NACA 7310 airfoil for the high camber airfoil.

This week has been fairly uneventful, as all of the necessary float hardware stuff is done. Now we just have to make the elctronics work properly, and I have started a new branch of the Float. Last year for the science fair Scott and I decided to try and make an underwater glider, which did not work well, but we were still able to study different wing progile shapes. This topic has always interested me since then, as it blends what I am currently doing now, with the aviation side of me.

This week was mainly just adding little bits and bobs to the float to make it more reliable, and properly function. So, since last week we realized that the wiring for the Hall Effect Sensor was incorrect, and we are not really sure how it still kinda worked. So now that we have that sorted out we are still going to add the second hall effect to increase reliability even more.

This week was a pretty big week. It was our first pool test and first water test. The outcomes of both of these were very good as nothing broke and we were able to dial in the weights, and the super unreliable hall effect sensors. This testing also brought along multiple new ideas which included, using two hall effect sensors, and changing the voltage that the hall effect sensors run on.

This week was a little bit of a dissapointment, as we had a snow day. This made it impossible for us test in the water on wednesday. This week I started working on the density calculation in order to see how much weight I had to add. I ran into some issues with figuring out how much volume the float displaced, as 1 cubic millimeter is not a mililiter. Once I got that figured out, I designed a weight system that is very similar to the weights last year, as those worked very well.

This week was pretty dry as the float is pretty much done hardware wise for its first test. This has left me with very little to do in shop. The one project that I have been working on this week was the waterproofing of the antenna, which I am pretty sure will work well now. I still have a few kinks to work out, however these aren’t particularly time consuming. I have also started working on the floats internal documentaiton.

This week was much of the same as last week, with some much better news, and some much worse. I will start off with the good news. Scott figured out what was wrong with the hall effect sensors. At first there were a bunch of micro shorts, as the endmill we used to mill the board was fairly dull, and we didn’t know to scotchbrite it to remove the conductive fuzz.

This week was what we less affectionatly like to call integration hell, or when multiple parts of the project have to start interacting with one another. In this case, we started to run the piston off of the battery and custom PCB. This cause a few problems that we still have to iron out. Battery Woes # The custom battery that we designed is great, except it only goes as far as the actual cells inside of it.

One thing that I have learned with doing the hardware for these projects, is that everything feels like its crawling, until one week all of the hardware is pretty much done. This was one of those weeks. On the float there were two main design challenges that were properly hard. The first was the Piston assembly. This was mainly hard because of the dynamic o-ring seal, which was time consuming, and because of the anti-rotation rods, which came out very nicely.

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 was a very exciting week as I finally got the floats piston seal working. This is very monumental for the float, as it means that we can start to assemble it, and also proves that it is possible for us to do it with the tubes that we have. The next order of buisness is to machine the piston out of aluminum. For the rest of the week I worked on the PCB mounting solution.

This week I started to work on the float again. At this point it was a lot more waiting for prints to finish, then testing them, then reprinting a new version. This meant that I had lots of downtime in the shop. With this time I did a little project for Mr. Christy. Mr. Christy is building a herb press that uses an 8 inch C clamp and a steel cup.

This week was crunch time. With the MITRE ceremony next week these were the last 5 days that we had to get JONA ready for its unveiling. Most of the stuff that we did this week was fairly small, but very important. These things included thruster guards, all of the small little wire that connect things in the tube, and also crimping literally everything. This is JONA so far. We still need to add a couple connections on the inside, but it is very close to being opperational.

This week we got invited to the MITRE corperations opening ceremony for their new research pool. For this we decided to try to rush and get our brand new JONA ROV up and running, which was a large task. This is mainly stressing two areas of the project, hardware and electronics, but mainly electronics. For the electronics, we needed to surface mount 8 ESC’s to custom carrier boards, which is a lot easier said than done.

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.