Thursday, May 8, 2014

Build Day 6 & 7

Build Day 6 & 7 were pretty interesting.

We ran into a few problems.  I was honestly a bit surprised we had not come across any real setbacks until now, so overall our progress is still pretty great.  That being said, we did have those problems I mentioned...

What kind of problems, you might ask?  Well, for one, the battery tubes, needing to be completely watertight, were quite a tight fit.  So tight, in fact, that when we attempted to pull the cap back off to recharge the batteries, the acrylic base popped right off.   Here's what it looks like, quietly re-cementing in the night:



Having to reseal this guy with acrylic cement again meant no water test on Day 6 like we had hoped, so we put that off for now.

Our other issue we ran into was this:


We got the pins reversed on that bottom row, so we had to resolder the wires from the main wiring harness onto a new DB-25.  Trey and Danny knocked that out on day 7 and the new DB-25 looks great and tested out fine this time.


Lastly, the build guide stated that we'd need to sand down the white crossguard that fits over the vertical motor to make sure it fits flush.  Well...after almost two hours of first sanding and then switching to a metal file without any real progress, we knew desperate measures needed to be taken before we filed the crossguard down to nothing ( a dremel would have worked, but we didn't have one with us that day, and it would have thinned the guard down too much anyways.)  So Richard took a hammer and pounded the propeller down a quarter inch or so.  After that percussive maintenance, you can see it now fits perfectly:



Now how about some good news?


We have booted in to the ROV!  There are beautiful blinking lights now when we plug it in.  Yeehaw!





In our next update, I'll post the results of the water test and the new firmware tests.  We're almost there!

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