SCINI AND SARA Take Center Stage
by cameo ~ December 12th, 2008. Filed under: Uncategorized.Today was the day that the ROV’s got all of the attention.
SCINI was the star of a webcast and she let Stacy and Bob share the limelight. The webcast was put on by the Exploratorium which is in San Francisco and believes that a museum should be a learning experience. If you would like to view the webcast go to the Explo.tv section of www.Exploratorium.com and watch “Ocean Ecology”. You can also check out the other webcasts that are being done with scientists working in Antarctica.
After the webcast Bob and I began some much needed work on SARA. For those of you that don’t know, SARA is the ROV that my students built. She was slightly damaged during the journey to Antarctica. In addition, there were a few things that Bob, the engineer, suggested we do to SARA to improve her functioning.
I first examined SARA to see just what was damaged. One of the struts had broken free of its plastic tie and I quickly reattached it with a neon yellow plastic tie that went lovely with SARA’s color scheme. The next thing I noticed was that the piece of Plexiglas that we had attached two of the thrusters to was cracked.
The damaged piece of Plexiglas that was used to attach two of SARA
I cut off the plastic ties that attached the Plexiglas to the frame and then I also cut the plastic ties that attached the two thrusters. Bob had a great idea to connect the two thrusters directly to the frame using plastic ties. One would have the valve go up and the other would have the valve go down. These thrusters obviously control down and up.
The thrusters are attached directly to the frame and the cables are shortened.
Then I stripped all of the cables. Each cable had a black wire and a brown wire and I then had to strip each wire.
I stripped the cables and then the wires. You have to be patient or you will cut right through the wires.
The next step was to twist all of the black wires together and then to twist one wire from the ground wire to each of the brown wires. Bob then taught me to solder. This is where you melt metal (tin and lead) onto metal using a hot rod. It is harder than it sounds but I had a lot of fun.
I got my first taste of soldering and I liked it.
Bob gave me little plastic sleeves to put on the end of each soldered wire. I then used a hair dryer to heat shrink the plastic sleeve. This will protect the soldered wire.
Who knew that a hair dryer had so many uses?
The next thing I did was to put a plastic tie around the wires and put them in the gray container that looks like a gun.
Everything was tied up neatly and put in the container.
We then used the sealant foam that I had brought form school which is aptly called “Great Stuff – Insulating Foam Sealant”. This stuff will make the wires waterproof.
We put the foam sealant in the container with the wires.
You spray the foam and it expands by 50%. We also put the foam in the floats to seal them as well. We had a hard time judging when we had filled the container half full. It spilled out of the ends and kept spilling out. We decided to leave it until tomorrow.
Oops! We used a little too much foam sealant in the floats.
In the meantime, we started to work on the control box. I should explain that what SARA needed was to have the two thrusters reattached, the floats waterproofed, and the wires soldered and then waterproofed. Bob offered to help give SARA a bit of a facelift. Who could say no to some free help from a real electronics expert and the price was right (free).
We organized the switches on the control box top and then flipped it over and began to connect the switches. This involved more soldering. I am getting to be a real solder expert.
All six switches had to be connected by soldering a wire to them.
After we had connected the six switches to each other, it was time to solder a wire from the grounding cable to each switch. We made sure to match the wire to the thruster to the switch.
I got to do a lot more soldering.
The final result was a control box that was able to control all six thrusters. Bob then gave SARA a lovely cable that would easily connect her to the power source. He also recommended putting the hole in the control box on the side instead of the bottom where we had put it. This would allow us to put the box on the ground and work with it.
The finished control box.
While Bob and I worked on SARA, Stacy and Scott were busy packing up the lab. It is quite a job.
Packing can be a very messy business.
They use lots of different containers to ship items back home. They also box up some items and leave them in Antarctica for next year.
It is the biggest suitcase that I have ever seen.
All day long Scott worked with a bit of a disadvantage because he had lost his voice. I had a little fun trying to make him talk or at least laugh. He was a really good sport about it and it made the day go a little faster.
Scott was speechless all day.
It was a very busy day and tomorrow promises to be just as busy.