Year One

When I decided to start the club here at Western Washington University I went to the Associated Students (AS) and asked how to go about making our club official. There were three main steps: find five members, write a club constitution, and go to a AS council meeting where they ask about the purpose of your club and make it official. Those steps weren't too hard to complete. My brother, Erik, was interested in joining and so was his roommate and one of my friends. The fifth (and sixth) members found out about the club through an announcement I made in my chemistry class.

I thought it was great that we had a variety of majors in our club: Kinesiology, Geology, Chemistry, Environmental Science, Plastics Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. The downside of our very diverse club was discovered very quickly. We didn't have enough experienced engineers to solve our electronic dilemmas. The method of circuit building I had used for many years wasn't compatible with the power requirements of the university level competition and we didn't know how to adjust our design to make it work

This is when things started falling apart. Before Spring Break our budget authority was asked to place a purchase for the necessary parts. But without anyone's knowledge, except for our budget authority's, the items were placed on back order and would not arrive on time. And this person went AWAL a couple weeks before the qualifier, so we had no way to get the info we needed so change the order or place a new one. And time was of the essensce

We were at a total loss and I spent 15min every afternoon in my chem professors office discussing our options. The day before the competition we buckled down and made a make shift system with LED lights to in our circuit in an attempt to lower the voltage across the motors (something the expensive, and missing parts, were supposed to do). By midnight, we had motors and cameras held to our frame with zip-ties. Our ROV looked like something you'd find in the junk yard. But it was built. We named it Njörðr [nyawrd] which is a Norse god associated with the sea.

All we had to do before leaving for the competition in 6.5hrs was test it. We had never been able to find a power supply that would give us 48V and 40amps. So...we did what any dumb desperate college students would do. We used 4 car batteries, two of which were still in cars. It was a dark parking lot, it was raining, and, well, there were some sparks, some screams, and lots of racing hearts. And the result? When I held the controller in my hands and flipped the switch to move the motors the lights turned on, but the motors didn't turn. 

It was very disappointing. The hours and hours we'd spent over the last two quarters finding dedicated members, raising money, and building the ROV, were gone. And we had nothing but a square PVC frame with yellow and green lights to show for it. But we had fun and decided that things could only go up from there. And they have!