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 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 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.

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.