Day 3: Lets Compete!

Today marks the true start of the competition!  Last night we were able to choose which qualifying run time we wished to run based on our standings from last year.   By the time it got to us, 12:30 was the latest we were allowed to hit the pool but that gave us plenty of time for an early morning practice run and some debugging time if we needed it.

After a long night for the club 5:30 came early, a necessity after a long nights work if we were going to get everything packed up and make it to TRANSDEC early enough to get a nice early practice run in.  Thankfully everyone is pretty on task and we were making tracks for the pool by 7.  When we arrived we put in for the 8:30 pool test slot and Chris headed right out to start taking some accoustics measurements after some major retooling of how the correlation block was being executed on the blackfin.  Accoustics seems to be growing ever closer to that magical point of actually being able to drive Seawolf!  We're hearing pings loud and clear and are now just working on effectively measuring the delays between when the ping reaches Seawolfs four ears.  These delays will enable us to locate the pinger and hopefully track it down!

The 8:30 pool test wound up being more like a 9:15 pool test due to some delays at the pool and kind of dampened our hopes.  It turns out gatorade bottles don't exactly hold their shape when you fill them with air and submerge them 8 feet under water, meaning our ballasts stopped giving us much flotation.  Seawolfs a bit on the heavy side and losing boyancy was wreaking serious havok on our ability to accurately find and maintain a depth.  While this wasn't much of a problem for the gate mission it proved disastrous for trying to bump the bouy.  Our emergency breach code kept trying attack Micheal 
(our diver for the time) after seawolf would start sinking at depth due to compression and our control code not ramping up quick enough to compensate.  Thanks to Maryland we've now replaced those pesky bottles with some pink foam that seems to be working well (if maybe not a little too well as we've now discovered).

While inspecting Seawolf after the test run, we noticed that one of our Fischer connectors (our class A waterproof connectors) was beginning to corrode.. readers from last year, this might sound a little familiar, and yes, Seawolf was once again performing chemistry experiments.  A solid round of testing by Rabbit found that the aluminum frame that holds Seawolf together was carrying a voltage! After a good deal of debugging we found that one of the connectors had a shield wire touching the outer casing.. we'd found our culprit, the source of our attempts to once again electroplate Seawolf.

After a bit more acoustics testing and some  buoyancy adjustments in the dolphin pool (small pools set up for teams to test in) 12:30 rolled around and it was time to see old Seawolf get into action.   Tetherless Kirk (resident Navy sailor dude for lack of a better description) lowered Seawolf into the water and after explaining our mission start/killswitch system to the diver, the swipe was made, the status light blinked and Seawolf dove.  It quickly became evident that we had overcompensated a bit in the boyancy department, even at when she was at depth you could still see the jets from the struggling thrusters breaching the surface. Due to a cross breeze there appeared to be a current in the Transdec pool, combined with the mistake of leaving her forward speed set a little low and the immense thrust the vertical thrusters were exhibiting Seawolf barely missed making it through the gate deciding to split the right side pole instead.  After two more attempts with various degrees of success and failure we yanked her our of the water, Michael plugged in the tether and corrected our speed issue.  We reset and tried again, this time succeeding in making the gate!  Sadly we never saw the path on the bottom of the pool and got a little hung up looking for it, forcing the restart once again.  We again managed to make the gate but path align failed again.