Week 20
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. So we milled a new one with the new step and soldered it up. This time it worked, but the sensor was quite finiky. Scott also figured this one out too. The internal pull up resistor was not large enough for the longer lengths of wire that we were using, so it wasn’t getting the right amoung of volatge to trigger and whatnot. So for the bad news. Scott then milled a new board with the added resistor on it. He then soldered it up and tested it. After a little bit the motor driver caught on fire. This is not good. This fire wasn’t catatrophic for the shop, but it did remidy the microcontroller that we were using unusable, so we are now waiting for more to come in. In the meantime however, scott has been designing us a new board in Kicad, which will be much better than the old board in terms of wiring and mounting, which means, easier for me!
Once scott started working on the new pullup resistor board I peeled off and started to work on the antenna. Mr. Christy had an idea that has worked for him in the past. He wants us to try to squeeze the crap out of nylon washers on either side of the SMA connector. I have my reservations about this, but I figured that it was worth a shot at least. Now this would be all fine and dandy if I had the nuts for the SMA connector. I didn’t. So Mr. Christy was going to go get some on his way home, and I was going to make some of my own. Now. It wouldn’t have been me if I didn’t make one crucial mistake. The nuts I made were infact not the right pitch, nor the right system on measurement. I made M6x1 nuts with 9mm flats, and the nuts I needed were 1/4 36. In my defense I was lied to, and 1/4 36 is a VERY obscure thread size (I couldn’t even find them on McMaster Carr). Now the Shop has some alluminum M6 nuts I guess?
The thing that I have now started to work on a little bit is the manipulator system this year. For this year we are going to go with the exact same interchangeable manipulator system as last year, which I created. It is basically a hexagon with a magnet on it, to allow the tools to be mounted upside down and righ side up. I will probably delegate the first task to a freshman, who will basically make an adapter for a fancy bit of bent rod to fit onto this system. This will allow us to poke through pcv the long way, and then make sure it doesn’t slip off. The other thing I have already done. It is a broom holder screwed onto a peice of aluminum extrusion, which is then screwed onto the ROV near a camera. this allows us to hold vertical pvc pipes, which is honestly pretty neiche and doesn’t give us that many points, but was pretty easy. We still haven’t tested it, and if it doesn’t work it wasn’t a huge investment, so we don’t really loose anything.
