After several years of successful underwater robotics experiments we had our first case of water leakage into the inside of the robot. As one might expect, it was due to human error -- a miscommunication regarding who was responsible for tightening certain seals. As a result, water from the McGIll pool leaked into the robot vehicle during a test and quite a lot got in before it was discovered. THings seems more-or-less OK; this is the kind of problem you want to have in frash water, not salt water. As such, it may have an up-side getting rid of complacency and reminding everybody to be fanatically careful when the robot is at the real sea trial.
Thinsg are still being dried and re-assembled, but it could have been a lot worse.
FOLLOWUP: All this stuff was repaired and worked in later pool trials.
2006
2006
This past weekend Chris and I went and took the rescue diver's course in Toronto. This combined a "First Emergency Responder's" course on CPR, making splints and suchlike with a course of how to recover non-breathing divers, how to subdue divers in a panic, and how to tow tired divers to shore. The course is probably one of the most substative single PADI scuba courses. It not only includes some useful (and potentially life-saving) scuba skills, but a lot of general knowledge that is good anyplace.
It's a tiring course and we had to drag each other around the pool in various ways. The most spectacular part is learning to essentially disable a diver on the surface who might attack you because they are experiencing irrational panic.
2006
Well, Nicholas and Natasha got a Nintendo Wii for Christmas. It really is a very interesting gaming console. The basic console is not that unusual, but the remote unit uses an accelerometer to steer the pointer and there are some games that capitalize on this nicely.
It also supports internet connectivity, but this is not uses to much effect. Setting it up caused a few problems (erro 51130, 52230, etc.).
To allow it to use the internet, I had to disable WEP on our wireless box. It is capable or WEP, but there is clearly something "funny" about it; I am pretty sure it needs the WEP key in hexadecimal, and I was entering it in ASCII.
The error 52230 seems to be a result of the Wii sending a TCP SYN request to conntest.nintendowifi.net on port 80 (the usualy port for HTTP), but not getting a response SYN-ACK response back. This is a typical symptom of a failed internet connection. Such an error is probably not due to a firewall rule, but can be caused by other kinds of router security such as restrictions on access to only registered computers.
When it connects it looks for conntest.nintendowifi.net (connection testing) and gets a simple test HTTP page. A bit later is asks for wiinat.available.gs.nintendowifi.net, which it contacts using UDP -- this may only happen if the above fails. After that, it asks for wiinat.natreg1.gs.nintendowifi.net (as well as natreg2 and netreg3).
Later it does a bunch of UDP traffic to 207.28.11.12-13, which I
think it looked up from the previous UDP traffic.
... ...
There's more. Read the whole story on "Wii"
