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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.