Well, it’s 10:21 AM. Our first preliminary run starts at 11:00 AM. As of now, two teams have made it through the gate, and two teams haven’t showed up. One team, I think the University of Florida, navigated to the acoustic pinger and surfaced.

We also have another run tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM.

The results of these runs will determine whether we make it into the finals. We can navigate through the gate just fine. We spent all night hashing out the acoustic navigation software and we’re very confident that we can find the pinger and hopefully surface. If the robot doesn’t surface we set a timeout, because we know it finds the pinger but it has trouble surfacing.

After the pinger we’re going for the pipeline then the docking station. We chose to do the docking station last because 1) it has the least amount of points associated with it and 2) there’s a chance we’ll start following the sun and run in to the wall – which would be a disqualification.


Mike, Erin, and Jim


Transdec

It’s almost 9PST and I’m standing here blogging pool (amazingly large dive tank?)-side. Our arrival time was pushed up one hour this morning to get teams here in time for some live coverage from a local San Diego TV station.
…
Yeh, definitely got up at 5 AM.

Mike and I walked into the command/al queda room to find no robot. Mike said, "surely it isn’t in the pool now … " Sure enough, Frankie/Jim/Sterling were at the pool, and had been all night testing.

We buttoned up the robot and got onsite around 6 AM. The TV guy wanted to show our robot on TV so we hoisted it up in the air and were on live TV. We’re trying to get a copy of the tape. Your’s truely was the PR guy and did an awesome job pimping the robot to an uneducated CA audience.

HOWEVER, After about 2 hrs, this guy is getting aggravating. He keeps wanting to show the robot during commercial breaks and it’s interrupting our testing.

We’ve got a TON of work to do and need as much uninterrupted time as possible.

Oh, and as of 9AM  MIT and Cornell haven’t showed up today. They’ve won first places in previous years, so if they’re having trouble this could be a big break for the rest of us.

I’ve got a lot of audio but it’s taking a long time to edit. Fingers crossed I’ll have the first podcast up this afternoon. In the mean time, here’s a few pictures from the first day of practice.


shot of our setup


Here’s Seawolf being hoisted into the water for the first time.


Behold the beauty! Mike spent an hour and a half putting those stickers on. He’s OCD about it.

Well, I lied. Apparently I do have my camera cable. So, here’s some pictures from earlier today.

When the sun goes down, it gets pretty chilly here. Matt was freezing his butt off in the pool for a couple of hours, and now Jim is in the pool.


NCSU


University of Florida


Montreal

Day one of the NCSU Underwater Robotics team’s trip to San Diego for the International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition has come and gone. We arrived in San Diego around 10 AM after some miserable flight time. We waited around in the airport for about 2 hours for our luggage and a proper sized vehicle.

We set up one of our hotel rooms "al queda" style with all the equipment and the robot. Frankie (team captain) and Sterling (software god) are staying in that room and started setting everything up while myself (controls guru, etc.), Mike (wiring master), and Jim (genius Indian) went off to buy stuff.

San Diego drivers are crazy and we spent a very long time looking for a Target/Walmart and  Lowes. Six or so hours later we finally arrived back to mission headquarters.

One of the problems we’ve been having is that our dropper box is interfereing with our DVL (Doppler Velocity Log, aka extremely expensive magic box). Thanks to the genius of Ken Boone we bought ourselves a can of pineapples, ate the pineapples, and ghetto rigged the can around our dropper box to magnetically shield it from the DVL.

We spent the evening half dead from lack of sleeping while working on trying to get our electronics tube back together.

Tomorrow we go to the introduction meeting for the contest.
I’ll be posting episode one of the podcast sometime today, so stay tuned for that.