Today was our first day in San Diego. We are staying at the Kona Kai on Shelter Island, as per the usual competition host hotel. It is a great location overlooking the bay and a huge marina. We started off with a nice team breakfast at the Red Sails Inn. This is an annual event that the team participates in every year thanks to Dr. Schwartz. Our sub was supposed to arrive yesterday (Monday) at 10:30am guaranteed next day air by FedEx. The sub ended up missing a flight in memphis so it didn’t make it by Monday. The sub was delivered Tuesday morning around 11am, and we were happy to find out that FedEx refunded our shipping charge for their mistake. Good enough for us.
Once the sub arrived, we began reassembling the components which we had to take off during shipping, e.g., the two vertical thrusters and one strafe thruster. Our new Pelican case was awesome so we didn’t have to take any of the sub apart during shipping. A nice change from last year.
We ran several errands to Target, Home Depot, Von’s and a local hardware store to get extra supplies that we forgot or planned to buy. Tonight we plan to recalibrate the sub (hard and soft iron calibrations since components on the sub have moved and the earth’s magnetic field is different in cali) and dynamic current calibration since thrusters were removed and added back. Tomorrow we will head to the Transdec to begin our first day of testing at the competition facility at 7am.
Check back here on our blog for more team updates or follow us on Twitter: SubjuGatorUF. The competition is open to the public on Saturday and Sunday for the semi-finals and finals. The finals on Sunday is also broadcast live online at http://www.robosub.org.
