For several weeks, the waterproofing of our device was a big problem. The last test in the Hydraulic Machines Lab (HML) was not successful at all and we made our PCB drown in water. Fortunately, it was not connected to the battery so it survived.
Eventually, we tried an alternative way to ensure the waterproofing (adding cyanoacrylate and SikaBond to the opening). Since the HML’s facility was not available anymore at that point, we decided to make our tests in the nearest place providing high pressure liquid medium, Léman Lake! We rent a pedalo, pedaled a few hundreds of meters to reach a point where the water was around 30-meter deep (finding deeper places implied to pedal much further, but actually we were not allowed to go further than 50 meters from the shore so…). It turned out that the device was waterproof under such conditions and even sampled relevant pressure data (see the figures). This is very encouraging since it shows our first prototype is functional (at least this time). The next steps are:
- checking the precision of the device (the depth measurements were made with a simple rope this time),
- finding a way to sink the device properly (we cannot add the big rock you see in our package unfortunately),
- checking if the waterproofing is sustainable over time
- working on a 2nd version of the PCB & the Android app.
