I started the week off very strong. All of Monday I attempted to cut the mesh blanks for the thruster guards. I tried to use the water jet to cut the mesh. Each mesh was roughly 12 centimeters in diameter. the water jet originally did not work. I tried to up the thickness of what it was cutting, but that didn’t work either. Mr. Christy suggested putting a foam board below the mesh. He thought that this might help because it would give some backing to the mesh so that it wouldn’t bend as much. This didn’t work either. We checked and some grit was flowing and the water was flowing, however it barely scratched the mesh.

After these failures I gave up on using the water jet to cut the blanks.

On Tuesday I came in and Mr. Christy told me that the water jet was broken on Monday and he had fixed it. I then tried cutting the blanks and it worked perfectly. I then cut all 8 blanks for the curved section of the thruster guard using the water jet cutter.

next I Pressed each of the blanks using my mesh press. I decided after the testing last week that it wasn’t necessary to use all the bolts to clamp the press together. After I Pressed each blank, I used the press base and plunger along with a dry erase marker to mark where to cut the mesh. I then used tin-snips to cut the guards to size.

On Wednesday I used the pool to do the control testing for the hydrodynamics adjustments project. during this testing Jonas realized that the Yaw PID isn’t working properly.

After the testing I attached the rubber portions to the new tube clamps. After I trimmed the rubber, and used the soldering iron to install the threaded inserts. I accidentally installed threading inserts into a place where they could not be, so I removed them and used washers to fill the gap they melted.

I then removed the old tube clamps and installed the new ultra low profile ones. I tested the size of my pins for the top clamp and realized that they are not the right size. this along with the makeshift washer solution I used made me decide to re-print the part.

On Thursday we had gym, so I had very limited time. I was working on the servo gripper. after I wired up the system with the large servo gripping and uploaded the code. I knew the rotary encoder was functioning because I had it displaying its output value In the serial monitor. After lots of troubleshooting and switching out the servo, I asked Adam Lewis for help but he couldn’t find the issue. I went to my last resort: the great lord electrical engineer Miles Hillard for help.

within thirty seconds of looking at my setup, he realized that I didn’t have common ground. After I changed that, the little servo was working.

I ran out of time to test the larger servo, so I plan to do that on Friday.