A very, very tough day today. We went to bed last night knowing that some of Bridget's cables had been burnt to cinders and that the laptop to control Bridget had fallen and broken the screen. Also the network was not functioning as required. Remember what I told you about unexpected circumstances in field trials? It happens. So we woke up at 0700 hours, concerned that Bridget may not be ready for the first day of the Field Trials.
Lester took over and spent the entire morning - mostly helped by Andy - to repair the CANBus cables that control Bridget's steering and driving motors. Martin, meanwhile, tried to sort out the network in the room set aside for the PRoVisG team.
Some of the PRoVisG team went down to Llanos de Ucanca to do a static imaging test - one of the few things they could do without Bridget. It's done with the PanCam mounted on a tripod.
Tick, tick; time was passing by and Bridget was still not ready. Lots of pressure, but steadily, the CANBus control cables were repaired and checked out. The local people were very helpful, even lending us a hair dryer to apply heatshrink to the newly spliced cables (thanks Marga). We even borrowed a flambe torch from the Parador kitchen (thanks Enrique) to finish off applying the heatshrink sleeving. If you cannot see the pictures below, go to this PicasaWeb Link. Finally, by 1530 hours it was time to test the new repairs ...... and Bridget was moving again! We can breath again. Nevertheless, we have lost half of a Field Trial day. We needed to catch up....and we did. Bridget is put into the field at Minas de San Jose and is working well. We're controlling her from the remote control centre (situated in the van), and the network is running fine. Working smoothly and efficiently, we managed to get through most of the imaging schedule set out in the plan. We finished late and exhausted but happy that all has turned out well. We turned the situation around .....and we really needed to! Read the blog for the day - Blog 15/09/11 |