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.