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.