Our team procrastinated a lot last year, and even with the motivation, we didn’t have the correct equipment or materials to build a proper ROV. Even the act of borrowing a capsule or a dome from CMR would have been considered unfathomable and extraordinary. Almost all our work was done at the last minute, where we worked from 3pm to 6pm for the week and 10 am to 3 am the night before the competition, where we finally understood our tasks and how to complete them rather than meeting once every week for a discussion led by our CEO to brainstorm ideas but with no substance or follow a manual to solder the TriggerFish. A few of us literally carried the ROV, the team, and a few whale sharks on their shoulders. Ahmed, our CTO, worked tirelessly to figure out how to put together the electronics from almost no experience. Although the programming was supposed to be split with another member, he ended up having to do all of it himself at 6am before the competition after only sleeping for 3 hours. You could tell his brain was fried in the images after the regionals, how he cut and soldered the ethernet cable without inserting it through the capsule countless times, how he connected the float’s fuse in parallel, how he connected the rasberry pi directly into the power supply and burnt the fuse, or how he soldered and epoxied the wires without thinking of putting the o-rings. Although Konstantin wasn’t in our team, he helped Ahmed a lot, coming over at late nights to help debug. Finally, Iyad and I were a bit slow sometimes, but we tried extremely hard to complete the mechanical side of the ROV. We had a joke about how Iyad doesn’t care about safety at all. When trying to remove a piece of PVC that was stuck, he would use all types of methods from cutting it with a knife to using the soldering iron to heat it up. To waterproof a motor for our gripper, we literally put it in a PVC, added a bunch of vaseline, hotglue, and epo putty (we used epo putty a lot for waterproofing and holding things together). Finally, I spent a lot of time trying to make the float work as it was the only thing that was relatively difficult mechanically. I spent a lot of time designing it on CAD at home and building it with Iyad (and it was extremely slow as the manufacturing team spent like a few weeks before bringing the prints). Here's a video of what happened last year.
Right after our failure at the Regionals competition, we went right to work, researching for how to make the float and gripper more reliable and to actually function. The hype eventually died down, and when we regrouped the next year, everything seemed like deja vu. There was no urgency and the communications went completely radio silent among the team. After looking at a lot of technical documentation and comparing ourselves with the Red Sea Robotics team, the team that qualified from regionals from KAUST, I realized that funding was critical and that history would repeat itself if we couldn’t fight against the tide. I compiled an extensive funding contact list with Iyad and urged our CEO to email many people. I also brainstormed all the parts that were necessary for building the ROV and the float with Ahmed and Iyad, and compiled a Google Sheet for all the online purchases (during this time we found that although Ahmed promised that he would secure us 3 T200s from the leftover KCRI funding of last year, we found that they all belonged to the other team because they put it on the sheet. I was pretty angry because they never told me about such an important topic and they fumbled the things that required the most money). Thus, we were literally working from scratch while facing the brutality of the IB curriculum. Despite making the tasks for the CEO extremely easy (he only had to write emails), he wasn’t willing to put in the effort and wanted to delay. Additionally, he had policies that were similar to last year, not understanding the requirements to build a ROV or a clear understanding of the scoring. Iyad and I had to buy a lot of float components from AliExpress with our own money. Because I really wanted to win, we had multiple heated arguments, which finally led to a meeting where I introduced Ahmed as our new CEO (although I could’ve lead the team due to my overall understanding of the tasks, I thought I wasn’t suitable for a leadership position in a company that requires members to do a lot of work but doesn’t have any punishments for disobeying because I was impatient with people who didn’t meet my expectations). Most of the other members complied with Ahmed being a temporary CEO to see whether it would make us more efficient, and it did. Ahmed had a much better understanding of the tasks, and moreover he would actually listen to what I have to say rather than ignore me completely because I spoke poorly of them. We organized meetings and brainstormed tasks for all the members. However, we were still in rough seas. Most of the people we emailed completely ignored us or didn’t have the ability to fund us. Luckily, out of all our emails, KCRI, CMR, and PCL were eager to meet with us. The meetings went extremely well (especially with KCRI) as we were able to show my frame design, the website I made, and ask for a specific amount of money as I basically finalized the expenses sheet. However, we ran into challenges as our supervisor wanted us to delay our funding so that she could secure funding for the regional competition and we were kind of ghosted by KCRI. Thus, we looked for connections to see if anyone’s parents were in key positions. One member in the team’s dad was able to fund but we ran into risks of embezzlement and conflict of interest. Thankfully, we contacted a friend’s dad who worked at KCRI and he immediately sent our supervisors the money after a few meetings. Additionally, a few members had relations with PCL from the WISER internship (and we heard that the other team worked there), and we met with the staff to talk about what was offered to us.
The team met a lot of uncertainty and difficulties in team management and funding, but now we organize ourselves, it’s smooth sailing.
