This week I finished some of the final aspects of BOB’s design.
I Modeled the strain relief and determined a tether to purchases. I Also found a location to purchase the Syntactic foam. From SynFoam, I can purchase it in a 2 part mix that I can caste. This opens up many organic geometries that would not be possible with traditional machining.
I Designed the strain relief to allow the rear dome covering it to be removed without interfering with the cables and penetrators it is protecting.
I did a bunch of buoyancy calculations where I started by summing the mass and displacement of each assembly and summing all of these together to determine the amount of buoyant material I needed to add to achieve slight positive buoyancy.
Next I independently summed the buoyant and gravitational forces acting on each component, along with finding the distance from the origin where their center of mass lies. I coalesced this data and used some math physics stuff to decide how much relative buoyant force I need to add to the rear of the ROV for neutral buoyancy. I found this to be 1 kilo at 10 cm from the origin.
Then I Removed this magnitude from the total required buoyancy, so that i could model uniform buoyancy everywhere else. I modeled the buoyancy material by extruding the frontal profile between the flanges and cutting out material that intersects with other components and thrust paths.
At some point in the week, I showed Andrew how to use a via on his PCB. He made a very small mistake while soldering, breaking a pad, so I helped by doing a bit of soldering to fix it. I made a series of mistakes while fixing it that created a very cursed soldering job that you will see in Andrew’s post.
