Well, the dome squad was a success guys, awesome work! Definitely a project to be proud of. We are going to have to keep this thing around and take it out in the claw from time to time! Some gems below of Streets on the sewing machine, etc....

The software is basically done so I'm working on the color indicator. Took forever to mill out the slot on the rotary table but it's awesome. Grading session is tomorrow so we need to debug the boost LEDs on the CVC tonight. Plan to get everything funcitonal for the grading session and then add some painting details, etc. for the presentation on Thursday...gonna be awesome!!

We performed our first driving test with two pots to simulate the CVC and it worked! It was reallllllllly slow though because we limited the DC to 40%. The prop shafts also seem really tight and we need to take them out and rethink the motor mounts. Also need to grease the prop bushings and file some flats on the prop side of the U joints. CVC is almost ready to go...

Checkoff 2 was a success! The CVC is almost done and we have two matching photocells now which are working great to sense user hands and light two LEDs. If we have time we'll put two matching LEDs inside the ACV to light when the user has both hands on the mini domes. The second serious water test was as success (we sealed the motor housing this time). The acrylic didn't crack when the bolts were torqued so we should be good to go for the seal. We'll mount the circuits on standoffs just to make sure...

We currently have a start on a CVC prototype which Jonathan is working out the kinks on. The rack and pinion gear is awesome. We also modified our boat design to use two pontoons connected to an acrlyic plate which we just gorilla glued to the bottom. Water test to come tomorrow. Kyle has finished the core of the state machine structure for the CVC and will be copying the files over to the ACV shortly. Should have all state machine code for the second checkoff.

Earlier this week we performed a water test on our seal but forgot to seal the motor compartments... more to come later. We also met this morning and sketched out an initial controller concept which Jonathan is going on over the next few days. We talked about building a dome hat to incorporate an accelerometer since Jonathan already knows how to use that but we're not sure what the input would be used for at this point. Over the weekend we'll be working on getting the rest of the RFID comm figured out so we can get checked off for CP#1.

Over the weekend we built our first foam boat using two rock crawler motors form the hobby shop. The motors seem to be drawing too much current and we'll need to look into motors with a higher terminal resistance. The boat did float, however, but seemed to dive forward when the props started up. We tried out our awesome idea of the PETG dome formed using the vacuum former under gravity and it seemed to work well. We had to weld a frame for the vacuum former to prevent dimples from the wires...