We've recently been having unreliable communications with SCINI over it's tether line, and have tracked the problem back to our power supplies. This photo of an oscilloscope shows the alternating current input to the power supplies: usually this is a very thin and smooth sine wave, but the interference has blurred out the top of the waves. We use an ethernet over power system to communicate over our powerlines (very similar to the HomePlug residential product), which itself communicates with tiny pulses on top of the larger 60 hertz (60 times a second) sine wave; this kind of blurry noise interferes with the data pulses.

Today we visited the "other" marine lab in Moss Landing, CA: MBARI, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. They kindly gave us use of their giant 11 meter deep test tank, which gave us room to fly SCINI for the first time! After a series of motor problems last week everything went very smoothly, with none of our equipment bottles leaking (let alone flooding and destroying our electronics!).

(continued, with video!)


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Our higher resolution Elphel camera is down right now, so this video was captured with a simple lower quality camera we slapped on in an hour or two.