Day 3 - IVER Progress

Today we fixed the problems that we were having yesterday by soldering the serial connector to the secondary processor board. We discovered that the pins that we had re-soldered toward the end of the night, about 3:00 AM, had become bent, some broken when we were assembling the IVER. When we arrived at the Trondheim Biological Station in the morning we decided that the best way to fix the problem with the pins was to solder wires directly to the board onto the surface mount pads. This would be a temporary fix that should hold for all of the testing that we need to do here in Norway. After working with that we had lunch at TBS with a large group of people some celebrating there PhD exams finishing and other around to greet us. The food we had was pizza with some unusual flavors. One flavor that stuck out was the Mexican Pizza which had jalapenos and other spices similar to Mexican food. Another was was a pizza similar to Thai food that had peanuts and curry sauce.
After lunch we took the IVER down to the water and ballasted it before deploying it. There was some trouble when we first placed the IVER in the water because of the extra weight of the oxygen sensor it made the entire robot want to sink instead of being neutrally buoyant. To correct for this we make the IVER a life jacket out of bubble wrap which made it float to the surface. It was necessary that the IVER have a slight buoyant force upward so when the mission was over it would stay at the surface of the water. With the IVER at the correct buoyancy we ran a couple of missions at the surface of the water to see if everything was working correctly with the sensor and if the GPS locations were correct. After it was all done we packed everything up so we could go to Sletvik the next day.