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.

Picture of ROV
This is JONA so far. We still need to add a couple connections on the inside, but it is very close to being opperational.

The one large thing that we did this week was the tether. This is a 100ft length of wire that carries power to the ROV. This year we are using BlueTrail Engineering connectors, that allow us to disconnect the tether from the ROV. This is great but it has its draw backs. We then need to solder our tether to the pre wired length of cable that they provided. This means that the solder joint needs to be water tight. I am doing this by completely encasing the joint in 5 Minute epoxy, using 3d printed molds to keep it from being a mess.

Picture of casts
Here is the casts that I made around the solder joints. I may or may not have taken 4.5 tubes of epoxy. I can neither confirm nor deny this.

Hopefully tomorrow we can get the ROV fully working underwater, then after the event we can get it working properly, as we are taking a significant number of shortcuts. Sorry for the short post this week, I have been overloaded with work, and there isn’t really much to report on, plus the ROV is taking up most of my shop time.