Eneko Exploring

MFT: Outdoor shower & my long sleeve sun shirt and pants
LFP: Mosquitos

Hallo, today we got to fully explor Eneko. Mostly this entailed digging trenches (we did four of them) and some GPR and some RTK (Richard got it working wooohoo). It's a really fun island. We started digging at 7:30 and the first trench went pretty fast but the second was a real dozy! It took like 3 hours to dig from top down. Luckily 2 of the trenches were pre-dug (thank you backhoes) and one was half dug (on the beach a scarp). We took a nice 2 hour lunch break (with snorkeling, cleaning kinda of clothing, and eating). The big thing is that Majuro has mosquitos so I keep trying to wear longsleeve clothing as the mosquitos go straight for me! Unfortunately I only really have one pair of this, so the stuff gets NASTY.

Tonight the big deal was doing laundry. We emptied a big bin (action packer) of food and equipment and loaded in dirty clothes, water, and detergent. I actually had to wear my dirty clothes into the ocean and rub them together in the water to clean them (I kept having clouds of dirt around me). Anyways, we let the clothing soak for an hour or two during dinner and then rinsed them (thank you outdoor shower) and hung them outside to dry. Hopefully tomorrow things will start a bit cleaner than today. But we will see...

Today was a full day on the island that entailed lots of arguing with the RTK GPS and lots of mosquitos. However, Richard managed to get the RTK working! I mean down to sub-decimeter vertical error! We are still figuring it all out. We've explored this island pretty well and collected lots and lots of samples. It's been nice doing hardcore sedimentology again (digging trenches, drawing said strat column, and sampling it). It's also been nice having self made meals and not having to go out any where.

I'll try to post more tomorrow! Our work is going well and we are getting what we need and want. We've got to CHIRP a basin and maybe visit another atoll this coming week. But we are pretty much working two days at a time. So tomorrow we get to go into town to get some new groceries and check the range of the RTK GPS. Sorry no new pictures (I added the ones from today to yesterday's post by accident).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hopper Last

Image
So we made Hopper hop....well sorta! We built a bottom for hopper's body by adding 6 puzzle pieces! Lots of fun making puzzle pieces that fit together in a tight fit. Then we have a small tail piece of foam that helps with the balance and the hop of hopper. We got in the long axel and put it in for the double axle of the engine. Unfortunately we picked up the extra long one which messed up our balance and looked REALLY strange. So instead we decided to use the shorter 100 mm axle (not the 150). But at this point our engine started acting up! So after an hour and a half of fiddling with the engine, we got it to stop making weird noises when it ran. We also decided to do some soddering. We soddered the batteries with the engine and added an on/off switch. Lot's of fun soddering again. After all of this our hopper is mostly working. I've shown you tons of pictures so here are the two new ones from friday: This is hopper with the 150 mm axle -- doesn't it look weird! yo...
Read more

Thermal Work - Matlab -- Write up

So I worked with Jeff on the matlab thermal work, since I had missed a fair amount during thesis time. WE managed to finish up everything. Umm ok here goes: So I worked up the part 1 of the thermal challenge in class with Robbie. The cooling and heating of coffee was really easy. But hey, I've done tons and TONS of matlab coding this semester (aka > 200 pages of matlab codes). Any who, what happens with bang bang is lots of oscillation for the control, aka the temperature of the coffee oscillates around the desired temperature. When you code in proportional control, you have trouble reaching the desired temperature. Instead the coffee tends to be right below the desired temperature and never quite reaches the desired temp. I guess Starbucks can't use proportional control then! It is quite fun to add in a time delay for the proportional control and bang-bang control. With bang-bang you see a fair amount of overshoot. You see some overshoot with proportional control too. a...
Read more

Hopper Finale

Image
He works! It's crazy soooo crazy :). Here are some pictures from hopper finale. We did all of the sodering and used the smaller 100 cm axle. We also got the alignment correct between the two legs. And he hops!!!! There is a movie I have, so please email me if you want to see it :). I don't know how to post it here so yea. We decided not to redo any parts as he works pretty solidly! There was one idea to make the big rabbit legs a tad bit smaller so that they rotate completely freely without touching the floor surface when he is hopping, but the weighting of the legs with screws really means that this isn't an issue! I think hopper is adorable and my partner is brilliant. I am good with solidworks and printing but she is good with lots of everything else!
Read more