Monday
João began the work of assembling the components needed for the Whale Wisperer. He started by dismantling an old set of headphones to retrieve the speaker and bluetooth microcontroller. Debate continued as to what would be possible in the short time we have. Interestingly, now João is more engaged with the process, Marko and João have swapped roles (pragmatist/visionary), now Marko playing devils advocate in pushing for limited functionality in favour of simply getting the thing done. João is optimistic that we could incorporate the magnetic switch on/off/play and the wireless charging without adding too much complexity. We tested the speaker for it’s ability to handle various frequencies using an online tone generator (pictured below) and it’s capabilities were good. Marko showed me how we can use a web service called DW to remotely control the raspberry pi. This will enable us to programme it to whatever specifications are necessary. https://api.dwservice.net/
tuesday
I continued to grapple with the sculpting in mudbox, but the mesh is still problematic. Dinarte does not have time or the skills to do more right now but Jorge said to come back to him if I couldn’t fix it, so fingers crossed he will be able to help me solve this.
Wednesday
Spent time with Jorge fixing the mesh. We resized to make more room for the electronic components and Jorge rescliced in order to flatten the edges of the two halves which have been slightly modified by my sculpting. There has been some back and forth between softwares but hopefully the mesh is fixed now and the print will come out OK. Jorge proposed three index points with pins and then joining with glue so we’ll see if this works.
Thursday
Yesterday Laura unexpectedly asked to to join a field trip and the weather this morning was absolutely perfect. We saw what Laura thought were Bryde’s whales but later, after other accounts came back that they were in the area and her more experienced (with fin whales - they are not common in Madeiran waters) colleagues heard the descriptions told they were fin whales which I have never seen before so that was very exciting. She got some of their calls recorded. Later in the trip we met some bottlenose dolphins and got really close to a group of pilot whales. My money shot of them swimming towards us and under the boat came to nothing because in my excitement I didn’t realise the Go-Pro had gone onto standby and so I wasn’t filming. I did get some nice shots never the less, and next week I’ll analyse the recordings and see whether I got anything. I was trying to capture their fins above the water because I wasn’t sure if they were near enough to see underwater, but for next time I will understand that if in any doubt, always keep the camera under the surface - the shots were pretty amazing. This was on the 4k cinematic setting so I should be able to zoom in as well if I use these at a later date.
During the afternoon I removed the forms supports with Jorge’s help, but we discovered the edges were still too uneven to fit together well. Jorge tried to add some pla manually and then sand it flat but this did not work. The problem half will have to be reprinted but meanwhile João can use the existing 3d prints to experiment with to see how the components will fit together, so no time will be lost.
FRIDAY/saturday
Friday was another public holiday and so I went diving. We dived the purposely sunk wreck at around 27 m deep. I was quite stressed by going inside so at one point I felt like I was hyperventilating but my guide Georges (another Jorge? I keep getting tripped up by the Portuguese J not being soft as with Spanish) was great and got me to kneel on the deck and relax until my breathing returned to normal. I felt like the regulator was hard to draw on, so this could be the reason, or just the adrenaline of going inside the wreck.
While the weather is so good, and to get back on the horse I went diving again on Saturday. This was a deep dive. My dive computer showed 34 metres at it’s deepest. It was another wreck, a hundred year old one and too decayed to be safe to enter so we just swam above it. Miguel led the dive. I had no panics this time despite the complexity - there was wind and no permanent bouy so the anchor had to be retrieved by using a floatation lift at the end. This meant we had to ascend using the rope but with negative bouyancy to avoid lifting the anchor and shooting up too fast.
There was also extra time to be spent at two point for decompression/ safety stops, which felt quite tricky in the moving water,. When the others begain to ascend beneath us we were surrounded by a shimmering, overwhelming, silvery bubbles. I wondered if I burst one of the bigger ones they might carry a message from your dive buddies below…. or a scream might erupt from one, right next to your ear… They look like flattened hemispheres of mercury. I wished I had been able to get a housing for my GoPro because this would have made for some interesting filming.
The view of the dive boat from the steps above the Carlton Divepoint