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 was my job, as I am one of the more experienced solderers on the team. This was hard. More than once, I got an entire board soldered up for everything to work, except for one ESC. This is still an on going issue that I hope to solve today, so that we get the ROV working by wednesday next week, and we can get it in the pool. The rest of the custom PCB’s were quite easy, and even fun, as it was just simple through hole soldering. The only thing that presented a little bit of a challenge on those ones were soldering the RJ45 connectors, which were very small for through hole components, but were really quite easy.

Picture of esc
Here is one of the ESC carrier boards that Aaron designed, and I soldered
Picture of all PCB's
Here are the rest of the boards, that hold the Logic, Power Distribution and ethernet switch.

Aaron BenDaniel took on the hardware side of this, as he was the one out of the two of us that came in on tuesday for about 6 hours, that knew how to use the water jet. The frame is made out of water jet 1/8th inch aluminum plate. Unfortunatly the waterjet clogged itself, but on wednesday Mr. Christy fixed it and Aaron was able to get the frame done and it looks awesome.

Picture of full rov
This is the frame that Aaron designed and built.