We set up an obstacle course underwater on Sunday to attempt to navigate and put ROV in the water.
Obstacle course sighted! |
We started flying, and immediately noticed that our balance in the water was way off, so we started working to adjust our weight distribution to get the ballast correct. Turns out that split-shot sinkers from a fishing tackle box worked perfectly for this!
They have upgraded from catching sunfish in the river to ballasting an ROV - a huge promotion in a fishing weight's life, I'd think.
Adjusting the weights |
Back in the water we went.
Thanks to David H. for hosting us at his apartment pool again!
Some of the team chats with David while rebooting the ROV |
Here's the part where things went wrong. One of our pre-flight checks on our checklist (yes, we print out flight checklists every time we dive...it is important to be thorough!) is to check the seals on the tubes. This is important because apparently you don't want water inside the main electronics tube of your ROV, who knew? But what we didn't do was check the seals again after adjusting all the weights on the ROV. So although newly balanced, we sprang a leak. I think it came loose when we moved the tube around adjusting the weights.
So yes, you are correct, that is BAD NEWS BEARS.
It went down something like this. I (James) was at the controls, wondering why we couldn't fly straight, just looping in circles. Danny and Richard and Arthur were calling out to me to stop spinning in circles. Someone noticed that there was fog in the main tube. We pulled the ROV out of the pool and...well, yep, it's now about 5% full of water, enough to puddle up in the corner.
The good news is that we never lost the video feed or the Cockpit from the ROV, so it still works. The bad news is that obviously our dive was over for the day.
Drying off |
The Interview that North Korea didn't want you to see |
It takes a lot of gear to do things our way |
Some positives we gain from this dive are that we had more control time underwater than ever before, thanks to our new LiPo batteries. Next steps are to fix our trim issues so that we can fly straighter underwater, and to attempt the obstacle course again.