- 8:30am (PST) on Sunday, 3 Aug 2008:
It is an overcast morning at the competition site. The air is clean and fresh. The teams
here are rather quite compared to previous days, perhaps because of nervousness and
anxiousness. Our practice time this morning is 9:20am; our competition time is 1pm.
- 10:20pm (PST) on Saturday, 2 Aug 2008:
We made it to the finals! We were the fourth ranked team before the finals. We also were the third ranked team from static judging on Friday. (Static judging points include presentation to the judges, the design of the submarine, the paper, the website, and the team uniform.
We were told that the finals can be viewed
HERE at 11am-3pm.
Many pictures from the last few days can be seen here.
- 10:30pm (PST) on Tuesday, 30 July 2008:
Today we got out to the competition site for the first time and qualified for the next round
on our first try. We are having some software problems, but will work on it all night to get these
problems ironed out before tomorrows practice (we hope).
- 9:30pm (PST) on Tuesday, 30 July 2008:
Travel was a nightmare. We left our homes before 6am, got to Atlanta before 9am, and waited until
after 6pm (due to several flight delays) to leave for San Diego. The night before, most of the
did not sleep at all. They almost all slept for several hours at the airport. While the rest
slept, Jose had homework to finish.
When we got to San Diego, are
luggage (and equipment) were no where to be found. And the airline did not know where the 16 items
were! At 1am local time, they still did not know where are bags were. Eight of us had no change
of clothes. At 9am the next morning, theyy still had no information. We went to the airport and
found them. See some
- 11:30am (EST) on Saturday, 26 July 2008:
We finally got SubjuGator into a pool last night (and left the pool at about 3am). Testing went very well.
We successfully tested depth and heading control, and "it’s faster and more responsive than any heading
controller I’ve seen on a sub." The Kalman filter is working well. The hydrophones are working better than ever.
Today and Sunday we will spend most of the day (and night through morning) in the pool.
We will be leaving
for San Diego at 7:10am (from the Gainesville airport) and SubjuGator will follow us, travelling with FedEx.
We are a little worried about the new TSA restrictions with batteries, but according to the website and the
manager of the Gainesville airport, we should not have any problems.
- 4:20pm (EST) on Wednesday, 23 July 2008:
We have not yet been in a pool. Last night we had another fire. The entire
floor of our buiding still smells 16 hours later. See below.
- 12:50pm (EST) on Tuesday, 22 July 2008:
We have not yet been in a pool. Last night we ran the sub hard in our stock
tank (i.e., bathtub) with no problems. We have successfully tested the compass
calibration. We started testing our compass correction from current
deflection software and the results look promising. We got linear curves
of deflection versus current, and we should be able to subtract them out
and prevent heading deflection. As it stands,
our current deflection is -35 deg to 27 deg (HUGE!).
The equations have been gathered and coded into the software, so later today
we will start it up and see how it works.
-
Compass Calibration 1 Video
-
Compass Calibration 2 Video
- 5:40pm (EST) on Monday, 21 July 2008:
We have not yet been in a pool.
Everything is working simultaneously now, from the six thrusters to all the
sensors. Our 3-D simulator is also fully functional now. Hopefully we will be in
a pool in the next 24 hours. (We had everything running in the stock tank, i.e.,
bathtub, yesterday and earlier today.)
- 7:10pm (EST) on Sunday, 20 July 2008:
We have not yet been in a pool.
We heard the all too familiar sound of sizzling and popping of motor drivers late
last night (the fourth time we have had a fire or a massive failure of parts in
the 8 days). But the good news is that just prior to this event, we got ALL of our
sensors talking ... finally: Compass, IMU, Depth Sensor, Hydrophone board, DVL.
Previously we got both cameras working.
- 12:40pm (EST) on Monday, 14 July 2008:
We have not yet been in a pool.
We had still another fire (our third in the last week) late last night. We believe that
it was caused by sparking as we connected power to the electronics. We are adding a
switch to better control the powering of our submarine.
- 3pm (EST) on Sunday, 13 July 2008:
We have not yet been in a pool.
We had another fire yesterday. This was our second fire in the last week. The first
was caused by shorting a battery connector to our aluminum battery pod rail. The result
was (luckily) only a hole in a thumb. The fire last night (July 12th at 9pm) was caused by a fault in our motor drivers.
The fuse blew, but not fast enough. We will working the next day or two to rebuild
all that was damaged.
The SubjuGator was proven to be water tight a few weeks ago (after we found and repaired
a pin-hole in one of our battery pod welds). Below are figures of our submerged SubjuGator
in our recently purchased stock tank (that looks like a deep bath tub).
We have built the tunnel (at a reduced scale of 4ft x 4ft x 4ft), the safe, and the target
bins and path segments (both in multiple scales).
- From July 2007 through July 7, 2008:
When we left the 2007 competition, our plan was to improve the software, trying to more
fully utilize Robitics Studio, to devolop a 3-D simulator and to perhaps
add an imaging sonar. At our first few meetings in July and August, 2007, we decided to
add a second embedded dual-core CPU, to help with the image processsing. This resulted in
a domino effect cascade of other changes. First, with the second computer, we determined
that more batteries would be necessary; but there was no more room inside the submarine for
batteries. Two battery pods was the obvious solution, something we had considered in
the previous year. But with the added front cross sectional area that the two battery
pods required, we determined that more forward thrust would be needed. We found excellent
thrusters, but we realized that new motor driver boards would be needed for these higher
voltage thrusters.
With our lead hardware designers having graduated, the new hardware team re-evaluated all
of the other home designed electronics and one by one re-designed EVERY BOARD IN THE
submarine!
In addition, in order to mount the new thrusters and the battery pods, we needed a new
exoskeloton to be designed and constructed, but also had our lead mechanical designer
move on to other projects.
As a result of the above, the only parts of the 2007 SubjuGator that remain in use in
2008 SubjuGator are the are the main SubjuGator hull, the DVL, the 4 hydrophones
(although now in a newly designed mount), the compass, the first embedded computer,
and the two cameras and camera housings.
- Monday, 16 July 2007:
Today we had our first our 2008 SubjuGator Team meeting. And so it begins.
Go Gators!
- 2007 Blog
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