The [almost] Final Push

Today was another long day. You woke up at 07:00 and met Nick at the hardware store to try and find 3.5" PVC pipe and special spray paint. You soon left the store and headed down to Baxter as the hardware store did not carry any of the materials you were looking for.

At Baxter you and Nick worked on wiring the submersible and creating a read thruster. You left baxter around 12:30 and headed home. You went to your house while Nick went to meet Josef and Liam at the school. While at your house you finished setting up the Raspberry Pi's (and accidentally broke one!...but no worries, you have another) and fixed the 5v power source you made last night. After working until 18:00 creating ribbon cables for the Pi's, you headed to academic awards. After academic awards you and Josef headed to Home Depot in Topsham and picked up spray paint to paint the sub with.

After returning home you fixed the large epoxied motor, worked on the second beagle bone shield. The second shield is below:

After spending more than 14 hours on the project, you decided to call it a day.

A day of many trips

You had a crazy day today. You woke up around 0730 and met Travis at the Hardware store at 0800. You didn't find what you were hoping for and so headed to Baxter.

There you finished cutting out the main thruster cone and also got a bunch of wiring done. You then took a bunch of parts that you need to fit together over the next couple days. From there you went to senior projects (and arrived at 1300 in time to see only one – Emma and Fiona's about co-operatives).

At FHS you met Liam and Josef. Josef went to Travis's and you and Liam headed back to your house. You then ate lunch and worked on the float for a while, getting half of it together in a nice fashion after a few small glitches. You then brought it to Travis's with some other stuff and all worked on a bunch of different things from soldering, to spray painting, to sanding. Around that time you also ate diner.

You then got ready for Academic awards and went to that long ordeal from 1830 to 2000. You then returned to your house to change and get some parts that your Dad had brought home from work. You then brought all the stuff to Travis's and resumed work. Turns out that some metal had to be bent and there is no good vice at Travis's house so you and Liam then went back to your house for half an hour (from 2230 to 2300).

Upon returning to Travis's you got a couple more things done for tomorrow including a couple more layers of spray-paint and a quick CAD model.

Main thruster and epoxy

You woke up around 0745 today and met up with the rest of the crew at school around 0900. You and Liam then headed directly to Baxter while Josef and Travis took care of tuxedos and electronic parts.

At Baxter you and Liam set up the router to cut out the mount for the main thruster. You the finished up some CAD models and wrote a little bit more of your essay. When Travis and Josef arrived you all split up and worked on a variety of things including readying the router, redoing the G-code for a new bit and putting together the last of the through hulls.

Liam then left and you and him edited each others papers. Following that you and Travis finished setting up the router, and after a little problem solving got the code to run. It still isn't quite done but should be soon. While it was cutting the three of you ordered pizza from Portland Pie Company and then Travis picked it up.

While that was happening you also had the 3D printer going to make a servo bracket and the last pot for a ESC controller. After finishing up around 1600 you headed back to Freeport. While Travis swam you ate dinner and counted up the number of man hours we have spend in the last two weeks as well as the total number of bytes that we have used in this project.

At 1900 you headed to Travis's house to work on a couple of things. First you epoxied the final ESC. You then spent a while trying to get the cameras to look nice before you epoxied them into their cases as well. Lastly you helped Travis with a voltage step down that he had been working on for most of the evening. When all was said and done you returned home at 2350 to write this post…

Finishing the Thrusters

Today you woke up at 08:00. You edited your Senior Project write-up and then went to meet the rest of the Limbeck team at FHS. There, you decided to split up. You and Josef would go inside and hand in books/assignments while the other two went directly to Baxter. You and Josef also needed to drop off your tuxedos and pick up a few 5v regulators at H.R. Distributors in Portland. After doing all those things, you arrived at Baxter at 10:30 hoping to finish all of the thrusters.

At Baxter you worked on finishing the second half of the submersible. You attached the other two motors and glued in the through-holes. After doing this you then put in 3d printed garbage blocks to stop any material from getting caught in the thrusters. At around 14:30 you stopped working and had lunch. After that you helped Nick cut our the rear thruster on the CnC router and also spoke with Mr. Amory about some details of the project.

While cutting our the large thruster mount, Nick took this awesome picture:

You thought that was worth sharing. Your returned to Freeport around 16:20 and then went to swimming. After swimming you met everybody back at your house hoping to epoxy another ESC and the cameras, wire up the motors in the sub, and finish the 5v power source for the float. Although both the cameras and controller were epoxied, you were not able to get the power source working. At first you had 2 resistors confused because of different online diagrams. After fixing them the source did not cooperate. After roughly 3 hours of work only half of the power sourced worked...hmmmm. You believe there is a problem with the radio shack perf-board as you had a similar electronics problem with the laser harp. You can't wait to fix it for tomorrow.

Frisbee, Grad Party, and RoboGoby

After a long night you woke up this morning at 08:30 to meet everybody at FHS at 09:15 for frisbee states. You then caravanned to the fields to play your first game at 10:30. At 10:30 you started by playing Windham. You won that game, but by the end were somewhat tired. You then played Yarmouth without any break in-between games (they hand;t had a game at 10:00 as they got a by). We lost that game and then continued to lose the next two games against South Portland and Falmouth A2. After playing frisbee games for more than 6 hours you were beat.

You headed home, took a shower, ate a quick dinner, and then headed to a graduation party in Yarmouth. The graduation part was for two of your friends you have been swimming with for the past 5-10 years. The food at the party was good (they had a portable brick oven!!):

 ...and there were lots of games and people there, although you did not know many of the people as they were all kids from Yarmouth. Anyway, you had a blast and then returned home at 21:30. Once you returned home to wrote your Senior Project Write-up, edited the presentation Nick had moved from our MLTI presentation, and then worked a little more on organizing the code for the project. You also started working on the second Cape for the Submerged BeagleBone, although it is not yet finished.

Frisbee states and busy work

Today you woke up around 0830 and then headed to the high school at 0915 to bring people to the Cumberland Fairgrounds for the frisbee states tournament.

Freeport Ultimate (FU) had a good first game – you won by universe point after hard cap. You then lost to Yarmouth, South Portland, and Falmouth A2. All four of the games were back to back so you played frisbee from about 1030 to 1645.

You got quite beat up from diving and sliding, with both hips having large scrapes as well as your right elbow, and you got a sunburn.

Upon returning home you ate, showered, and napped to regain energy. After recovering you wrote the first draft of your essay, created a rough draft of the presentation, and worked on a couple of Limbeck paraphernalia pieces in Photoshop.

Cameras and Prom (5/31)

You wrote this a day late as you got home fro Prom so late last night.

Before that though you worked at Travis's house from 0900 to 1400 on the project. You mostly worked with Liam and were trying to put together the camera housings and make the cameras fit inside. You cut slits in the boxes that needed it while Liam ground down the corners of the Pi-cameras so that they would fit. It turns out that you also had to cut away some of the box material so that the cameras could fit in the way they are supposed to.

After getting the cameras to fit you two worked on getting the pieces to mount together. You went to the hardware store and bought 6-32 threaded rod and nuts to make you own bolts (they didn't have bolts for some reason). Upon returning you sanded a couple of the pieces and cut the threaded rod so that it fit the pieces together as best as possible. You then tried to mount the nuts inside of a couple of the pieces so that they don't take up very much room. However, a blow dryer and a hot glue gun were not the necessary tools for the job and so we are going to have to wait until our next Baxter trip.

After returning to your house you cleaned your car, washed yourself, and got dressed for prom. You went to Emily Jennings' before and after party and while there you also saw loads of cameras…

You had fun and accompanied Emma to Emelia von Satlza's graduation party for a short time as well. Finally you went to bed around 0100 thinking about the upcoming frisbee states.