I Meant To Do That

Today was another full day of work for everyone, which typically means we are all happy from feeling valued or accomplished. However, one task in particular is one no one enjoys… cutting the media. Media is 40mm corrugated pipe that fills the two filter tanks. We have to cut this pipe into ~1.5 inch pieces, and we’ve estimated that 38,000 pieces need to be cut, roughly. So, it is an extremely tedious tasks that is killing us engineers because we’ve yet to find a way to speed up this process that will take multiple days to complete.

Anyways, the day started with Dr. Dodson testing out her water rocket for tomorrow’s STEM activity where the kids will get to make their own rocket using a two liter bottle. We originally tested the day we got here with a bottle found at the Village of Hope, but the sizing of the mouth/neck really caused the rocket to fly lower than expected. We finally were delivered the correct size of bottle and boy did this thing fly high. Now everyone was is excited to see the students launch their rockets!

After lunch, the majority of the team went out to the site and connected most of the remaining pipe! Apparently it is really coming together and some say it is almost complete. I truthfully cannot attest to this since most of my work has been dealing with the monitoring section of the project. Meaning my time has been spent inside, away from the project writing code, soldering wires, constructing the control panel/electrical, etc. You know, the mechanical engineers work all day out in the sun, and I, an electrical/computer engineer, sit inside and code with the fans on. Sounds nice, but try soldering with an iron that barely heats up, or using outlets and forgetting they aren’t grounded here. Lol fun times.. but here is a picture of the two filter tanks and a few of their piping connections.

Meanwhile, I was wrapping up some final code for the monitoring system and completing the electrical boxes. Not going to lie, the boxes look really nice and they have some sweet looking fans mounted on the side for ventilation. The Village of Hope is using some carpenters to build a housing unit to store the two electrical boxes and the SC1000 controller. They worked throughout the day and have almost completed it. They will wrap that up tomorrow and we will be able to mount all our electronics. The housing unit looks very similar to an out-house and has a tin roof. It is very well made, so I am really excited that are nice electronics will have a good looking housing unit right next to the system. Being a perfectionist, I can already tell this will be aesthetically pleasing to me!

After lunch, most of the team began cutting media while a few of us started the process of running power cables from the previously installed solar panels to the soon to be housing unit. This was a task we were not looking forward to because it required us to dig a trench all the way from the site to the control panels, which are located at the house across the street. Well, lucky for us Africa is celebrating a holiday today and the Village of Hope children were out of school. Da Samuel put together a team of kids to dig this trench for us…. Aaaaand it took them no time haha.

We ran the cables from solar panel box inside the house, up to the ceiling, out the roof, down the house, and to the trench. We then glued all the PVC pipe connections and then filled the trench back in! Here is a picture of Billy and Kyle up in the ceiling running cables, and then a picture of the piping used to protect the cables leaving the house to the trench (and a candid of some others).

This was a lot of the team’s least favorite day because they didn’t get to spend much time outside working on the system and instead spent it cutting media. Actually, they are back to cutting media as I write this, sooooo I am kind of tempted to spend as much time on this blog post as possible… but I should probably go help out :/

Lastly, unlike the others this was my favorite day. I was able to pretty much wrap up the electrical boxes and code, but I was able to actually go outside and get dirty and get some labor in! And I am pretty satisfied with the cabling! Enjoy this picture of Austin and his little friend!

PS – Hi Caleb! I love and miss you :(