I have been lax in both my updates and my project work, but here we go again. Since I last posted, I’ve moved to Alameda, California, started work at Makani Power, and gotten to know the folks over at OpenROV. Last year, I got join them on their Tahoe Haxpedition, which was a blast, because of all the excited underwater explorers who were showing off the interesting ways they had modified their ROV’s. This year, they’re doing it again!

https://openexplorer.com/expedition/shipwrecktahoe

When I got the invitation, I realized that I haven’t built anything for a personal project in a long time. So, I decided to give myself a little challenge: to design and build a new project between now and the Haxpedition. In that vein, I present:

The idea is to create an automatic tether management system, so that one of your dive crew doesn’t have to stand around and pull in or let out your tether constantly. To kick the project off, I met up with some of the OpenROV crew today, and brainstormed a whole bunch of features and design criteria that will be important to people using an AutoSpool. Now that they’re all in my handy notebooks –

I can decide on features I can commit to delivering and milestones I want to hit. It’s a bit late, so that’s all the introduction I can give right now, but here are my goals for my next post, which should be (latest) on Thursday:

• Fully define the project goal and specific measures of success
• Create a concept design

Wish me luck!