Yet another day in the desert.

ISFS staff: Justin, Steve, Gary (mostly).  Many ISFS set-up staff departed in the wee hours.

Today mostly was working through the rest of the punch list from yesterday:

• Sonics
  • t26 and t9 EC100s were reinstalled, now in binary mode, and were working
  • t2 had the EC100 green connector pulled and came up
  • 7m.t0 also had the EC100 green connector pulled.  We used the ladder as an extension ladder to access the 7m level on tt – a bit dicey, but easier than pulling down the tower for this simple fix.
  • t7: moved this CSAT3 to another port and are seeing messages, but there always are error flags (9, 13, 31) and thus no good data.  I'll do a better visual inspection of the head tomorrow.  If no obvious fix, we'll have to replace it with our 1 spare (the new CSAT3B that Tony got working yesterday)
• TRH
  • t2 was missing the SHT probe, then still wasn't reporting data.  Found that one of the Bulgin pins on the housing was pushed in.  Pulling it out (and feeling it click) got it going.
  • 7m.t0 had a blown fuse on ttb, DSM1.  Replacing it got it going.  Note that this is the "chewed cable" – maybe that is how the fuse blew?
• Nano
  • Yesterday, we had isolated this problem to the internal wiring within the EC100 box.  Today, found that the pins in the Bulgin connector were rotated about 180 degrees.  (pin 1 was in 5, pin 5 was in 1, pin 6 was in 2).  I swapped these, but managed to break two of the tiny wires in the process.  Just made a big solder blog to hold them together, since I didn't immediately locate stuff to re-terminate Bulgins.  Seemed to work and was reinstalled.
• Hot films (Gary spent a bunch of time on this and may want to write his own blog (or edit here))
  • Jielun looked at the data that Gary provided yesterday and sees that the signal hits a noise floor at 200 Hz.  This is probably usable, but we'd like lower noise.  After a bunch of (probably unrelated) effort, Gary is now taking another run with the hot-film applying a low-pass filter at 1kHz (I think).
  • Gary had noticed strange power behavior, with both(?) t0b and t0t Pis reporting low voltage and going through repeated boot cycles.  We looked at the Victron through its App and once saw it say that it briefly turned its output (load power) off, but not nearly as often as the Pis reboots.  Power levels went up to 56W (and idled at 35W), but still should be within Victron capabilities.  At one point, we got cycling to stop by pulling power to some of the CTAs (hot-film electronics), but the total power before was less than 3W, so this shouldn't have made a difference.  We left with things seeming to be happy again, with each DSM powered from the Victron using a splitter and only one CTA powered up (through t0b's AUX port).  We'll try introducing a 4-way splitter tomorrow, though I'm not sure where it ended up after clean-up.
  • We remounted the hot-film bridge boxes that might let us access the 4m level with existing cables and re-routed (temporarily) the cablesN
  • We mounted the 0.5m probe support

Tomorrow is supposed to be the start of operations.  Nearly everything of ours is running, except:

• The above-mentioned sonic at t7
• The EC150 at 28m on tt (of course) has never worked.  It has Pirga set at 500mb, rather than reading a sensor.  This is easy to fix using ECmon, but appears to be impossible over the serial interface.  Guess the tower will be coming down after all!
• Adding more hot-films.  We'll actually delay a day or three before installing more probes themselves until we get a feel for how long the one survives, but will get the rest of the cabling set up.
• Chenning's DTS still has power issues.  His students went to Vegas today to attempt to get a better inverter.  We'll help him get it installed.

I'm pretty happy with this status!  Thanks everyone for getting us to this point!