This week was quite slow, as I’ve been waiting for parts for both the ROV Frame and Electronics Enclosure. I took this time to begin writing documentation for everything I’ve done so far. MATE requires extensive documentation of the process of building our ROV. I’ve so far written a fair amount about the Frame, Electronics Enclosure, Camera System, and Thrusters. The following is an excerpt from what I wrote about JONA ROV’s thrusters.
“We decided to design our own thrusters guards, although we were heavily influenced by UWROV’s design. Our thrusters guards meet the IP-20 requirements of the MATE ROV competition but cause the minimum impedance of water through our Blue Robotics T200 thrusters. This allows us to make use of as much of the force our thrusters generate as possible while still maintaining the standard of safety required of us.”
On Wednesday the ESC PCBs I ordered arrived! They arrived super quickly, far quicker than we expected, although this turned out to be a bad thing. The reason the PCBs arrived so fast was because they were green. We thought we ordered black PCBs, which take longer to make, but for some reason we got green ones instead. Regardless, the color is aesthetic only, and has no impact on the functionality of the board.
Mr. Christy and I attempted to solder a Blue Robotics ESC to one of the boards, but the solder paste Mr. Christy had did not work. We’re unsure as to why, but the solder paste melted almost instantly (suspiciously quickly) and it was far too runny. It didn’t wick onto the solder pads and we decided not to attempt any further soldering until we had new solder paste. The solder paste we used was 6 years old, but I’m unsure how long it takes the kind we used to expire.
Thursday I soldered all of the connectors onto one of the ESC PCBs. We’re going to need two of them in the end, so we can test soldering ESCs onto another board and we can use the one I soldered today once we have perfected the process.
Our 6 inch tube also came in on Wednesday! I put together the tube flanges we had already received, lubricated them, mounted the electronics frame I had made a few weeks before, and put everything together. It looks pretty good! I can finally begin to see the electronics enclosure I’ve spent so much time designing beginning to come together!