Day 2: Bug Squashing

After a long day at Transdec on Wednesday we headed out to find some food chosing the always popular Baja Fresh.  The trip yielded  some quality food, a reminder of last years adventures (looking at you VT) and an awkward trip around the Carl's Jr. while we had left poor Thunes behind at CVS.  The remainder of the evening was pretty uneventful with the evening winding down uncharacteristically early for the NCSU URC. 

We were greeted to day two of the competition once again by the delightful wakeup call/advertisement hotline the Kona Kai has opted to employ.  I believe that they fail to realize that waking up to an advertisement is a sure fire way to leave a sour taste in my mouth for whatever it is they're trying to convince me to spend my money and  "extra" time on while we're here.

We once again made it to TRASNDEC ahead of our 7:15 unload time and quickly registered for our first pool test of the day.  That's about where things started falling apart.  Once we were in the water we started losing communication with just about everything on random occasion... Our little honey moon with the new and predictable Seawolf was coming to a close and we were starting to see problems of old start creeping out on us.  After a bit of debugging, it turns out, running thrusters and electronics on a single bank of batteries is either a project for grad students or worth avoiding by isolating your thrusters.

It turns out, big inductive loads, make equally big noise.  This meant that from time to time, the USB hubs on Seawolf were eating some crazy voltage spikes, resulting in the IMU and our cameras freaking out in a rather spectacular fashion.  Seawolf was regularly going blind deaf and dumb and worse than that, was having trouble putting it all back together once things had settled down.  Sadly this little problem has cost us our brand new power board... but a quick reworking of our old harness and a DC-DC converter has given us legs to stay in the competition!

While this hasn't completely fixed the issue completely, we're banking on a few zener diodes on the last few points noise could work its way back up the lines to the USB hub.