The days past so quickly I dont have time to catch up to all the events that happened, but here’s an attempt to bring you up to speed…
So Anita and I have specialised hardware roles now, with her having the secondary school to JC physics background, and the half of the team that sat for the circuitry lesson, she was the natural candidate for learning circuits. Meanwhile, given my heavy biology background and little to no knowledge of circuits plus sitting for the 3D printing lesson, I took up the 3D print of parts…
Not sure if I was clear enough about our battery issue, but in essence, the output voltage is much higher than what our components can withstand, so we will require a ‘buck’ or a ‘boost’ or, well a ‘buck-booster’ to fix the output– and Anita explains just that:
And here are Anita’s notes: Battery connections notes and her workspace… 
On the previous day, we had tested the water-proof-ability (?) of the dome, and found out that there were still gaps where the water could enter :(, mainly at the points where the screws were. 
This is because I instinctively thought you should avoid the holes when applying silicon, so that the screws could still go through. Unfortunately, that is not the case. I should have carried on and “sealed” the hole, so that there is sufficient gel around the edges. Thankfully enough, there was a solution to that: 3D printing caps.
<b-roll>
It took less than 2hours to print all 16 pieces, and after applying excessive amounts of silicon gel, I left it to dry overnight.
Alas, we had to go to the pool due to a prior booking, and while Anita finished up, we made our journey there: <cues more b-roll>
“wah this is like going to the gym”
And when we finally reached… someone ran up to us and said “IT’LL NEVER FLY” (jokingly, of course)
And because it’s now “modular”, we tried to assemble it as fast as we can.
But we soon quickly learnt that, well, in theory, it was a lot faster than reality.
part II below when Anita managed to join us (and when Zheng Xun had to rush off to ethics class…):
…and where Jing Rui and I left halfway to get the bricks as weight for our boat.
When we were finally done, we sent it into the water!
And then yet another issue cropped up: rotational force that we did not account for.
and here are some pictures for a clearer illustration:
Confused, we came back to lab and tightened every screw we could (in fact, I actually reached the point of being capable of overtightening screws till Justin had to help drill it out…), and asked Limzy for advice. He suggested 3D printing a longer bracket so that there is more support at the joints to prevent hinging.
In other news, here is how you remove an overtightened screw:
But the next day after further discussion with Tony, it was decided against because a 3D printed part is naturally weaker than the metallic structure, and we should instead reconfigure the boat rather than 3D print the bracket. So it was back to the drawing board, again.
This itself, took me a whole afternoon, trying out different suggestions from Tony and Dr Ho. In the end, it was agreed this problem would be avoided if we had just used the original design of a long profile across the frame instead. The “irreversible decision”, coined by Dr Ho, in cutting the long profile to make shorter ones left us with yet another problem: we didn’t have a long enough profile… luckily, Limpsy was able to find a long one somewhere in the lab.
The story is still unfolding… in the meantime, b-roll!
Here’s featuring Zheng Xun hard at work with the software, a part of the blog that is sadly under-documented. (Jing Rui and Anita were working in the morning, and were busy in the afternoon.) Nonetheless, here are some screenshots!
Its quite insane to watch how proficient the guys are getting at coding considering they had little to no knowledge of the coding language…