The Code Bender

Today kicks off our qualifying attempts at 11AM, our first of two.  If we qualify today it's on to bigger and better and time to start sleeping less than the average 5-6 hours of sleep per day we've currently been finding.  Luckily as sleep deprived as we may be, the energy around TRANSDEC is great and the club moral is as good as we could ask for.

So with that, lets move on to the slightly more humorous.  For one, we've discovered why crafts seem to like to break here... magnetic rocks. (see pictures)  We dropped our magnetic kill switch and upon picking it up discovered there were some little friends hanging on. They weren't metal shavings, but rocks.  And we wonder why the magnetic compasses go nuts here.  Yeesh.

On another note, we have apparently been doing some chemistry experiments with SeaWolf without knowing.  Yesterday we noticed one of our Fischer connectors was eroding and that the aluminum underneath was growing some interesting designs.  We assumed that something in the sharpie we had used to color code the connectors was eroding the material, we were wrong.... very, very wrong.  Last night during a late night pool test there was a mass exodus of tiny bubbles from the acoustics Fischer connector, scaring the hell out of me.  (first thought being, oh god, Seawolf is sinking)  Because of the earlier corrosion we ripped SeaWolf out of the water as quickly as possible only to discover a miniscule amount water had actually leaked in... Not at all matching what had sparked the panic.  Brooks was quick to the conclusion that based on the "corrosion" taking place on our frame that what was probably actually happening was that SeaWolf was performing electrolysis and electroplating her frame with the Fischer connector's aluminum.  After some testing we concluded that the connector was indeed powered (9V and god only knows how many amps) and our pretty little (haha... little...) lady was acting as a ground.  Since then the connectors been removed and Kevin has been working on getting the connector redone this morning.

Last night we also completed work on some basic acoustics code which will allow us to locate the pinger in a yaw direction and head towards it until vision can take over.  Vision also pool tested our path detector and follower so that we can hopefully do a bit more than make it under the gate when we qualify today!