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By Katie Anderson, August 7, 2012 8:08 pm

After a month of back-and-forth email with the Physical Plant, we got the go-ahead to turn on the South End pump! Once we did, we found out she’s working almost perfectly, with just a few disconnected spray jets and a misaligned spray nozzle – but these are all easily fixable. Unfortunately, a possible electric problem means we had to turn off the North End until later in the week.

The sad news comes from the South End, where the big jets are “on” all of the time. This means that if we left the South End running, it would flood Engineering Mall. We have pinpointed it to a stuck horizontal ring valve, which means we have to contact the physical plant – again.

Here’s hoping we can at least have one part of the fountain up and running by the end of the week!

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By Katie Anderson, June 12, 2012 12:15 pm

We met with Dusty (the Engineering Digital Media Manager) today to discuss the status of our public camera over-looking Engineering Mall and convinced the Engineering Digital Media Center (EDMC) that a camera was a matter of security on top of publicity. This means we will be getting an expensive outdoor security camera mounted on the roof of either CAE or Engineering Hall near the end of the summer – up and running no later than September. It will be installed by the Physical Plant, and maintained by EDMC.

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By Zachary, November 16, 2011 10:43 am

Through a series of unfortunate events, we are shutting down the fountain a bit earlier than usual. But we’re getting ahead of our selves. Let’s start from the beginning.

On Thursday, Madison had a very blustery and cold day. There was snow and wind, and everyone was generally unhappy with the whole situation. Someone was particularly unhappy with the running of the fountain. Apparently, the wind was blowing water from the fountain onto the sidewalk and into people’s faces. To alleviate the problem, Dustin was asked to shut down the fountain. To do so, he remote connected into the server and shutdown the fountain via software. After shutting the fountain down and then leaving to go to class, Dustin saw the fountain was still running. He ran to class and used RDP on his phone to try to shut down the fountain. After class, the fountain was still running so Dustin had to open the manhole cover and manually shutdown the pumps. (Note: the failure to shut down the fountain may have been due to a crashed cRIO).

With the pump off, the water stopped flowing and everybody was happy. The water level sensor had other ideas. It seems that after banging on the water level sensor, instead of being stuck off, it was then stuck on! When the water level sensor is tripping, it tells the pool to drain. Because the sensor was stuck on and the pump was off, the south end pool drained completely with the lights still on. When Dustin saw this, he realized that the pool needed to be filled so he turned on the pumps. Well, hot lights + cold water = explosions everywhere! The four lights that we replaced and got working exploded and shot glass everywhere. Needless to say, there was a bit of panic involved.

One of the things that we had been warned about was that nobody knew where the glass lenses for the lights came from. We were afraid that the fountain lights would not be operational during the winter. However, it was just our luck to find a box of replacement lens. We needed four; guess how many were in the box. Four. You really can’t make this stuff up.

On Saturday, Dustin and his brother Taylor, went out to fix the fountain. They cleaned up the glass, replaced the lenses, and acid washed the water level sensor. With the sensor cleaned and functioning properly, most of the lights resumed working. Only one of the four blub sockets was damaged beyond current repair. We will resume repair in the spring. After completion, the fountain resumed normal activity with three lights on.

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By Zachary, November 9, 2011 11:24 am

When one thinks of engineering, complex plans and well thought out solutions come to mind. This is true for many aspects of engineering, but when it comes to the real world, you’ll find that the solutions are not a elegant as you would hope. We had a problem for two and one half months where the lights in the south end pool were non-functional. We knew the there were shorts in the wires, but we didn’t have the time or expertise to figure out what was going on. This Tuesday, Dustin and Alex tried to test the water level sensor power box to see if they could short out the input to trick the lights and have them turn on. They found that the sensor was giving the same results when the pool was full and empty. Then they did the next logical thing, bang the water sensor with a wrench! After making a few loud clangs, the lights came on. There was probably something stuck inside the senor, but we’ll never know for sure.

Moral of the story: When in doubt, hit the pipes with a wrench. That has fixed a lot more problems with the fountain than we’d like to admit.

After “fixing” the water level senor, the remainder of the meeting was dedicated to preparing the holiday lights. We were able to find the controller box for the lights, but it was in a big mess of cables. It took us a bit of time before we were able to finally untangle all of the lights. After opening the lights control box, we found the homebrew Arduino setup. We ripped the chip out with some make shift wire and will begin programming it next week.

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By Zachary, November 7, 2011 9:13 am

We continue to test the fountain and locate points of failure. The lights in the south pool are still off. We are not sure if the water level sensor is not tripping causing the pool lights to activate or if the water in the lights is causing a short for all of them. We tried flipping the breaker to see if any of the lights worked but none did. To help clarify how things are working, we will be measuring the power in the water level sensor. If we can trick the system into turning on the lights when the pool is empty, we might be able to see if the water is causing a short.

In other news, a student documentary is being produced about Enlight. Katie will be filming Enlight members over the next two meetings. It will be interesting to see how the film turns out.

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By Zachary, October 26, 2011 9:50 pm

It was another interesting night for Enlight. We have been trying our hardest to get the north end fixed, but the fountain is not cooperating with us. The solenoid that fills the north end is working and responding to the water level sensor but is making a terrible grinding noise. Water is flowing in the pipes, but we don’t want to take the chance the something is broken and could overflow the pool. We’ve also encountered a pipe that is leaking badly through the insulation wrapped around the pipe. That stretch of pipe and insulation will have to be replaced.

On a good note, we were able to make the control room a bit quieter. We disconnected the weirs from the main air feed. Because the weirs leaked air both above and below, we always had to deal with the hissing. Now we don’t have to! Later that night, we also went over the LabView and C# code that controls the fountain with the new members.

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By Zachary, October 24, 2011 5:27 pm

With the North End drained, we’ve been able to fix up the broken purger. Under normal operation, the purger spins the water around and every few hours, it purgers some water to remove the sediment it collects. One of the two purgers got jammed. We removed the valve motor controller and found that the gear assembly got jammed open. After messing around with it, we were eventually able to remove the motor and attach the valve to the purger. It now acts as a manual valve.

In addition to fixing the purger, we also accidentally fixed the solenoid that filled the north end. For a period of time, it was not responding to the fill command from the north end. When we reopened the pipes in the bypass, the solenoid was open and sending water to the north end. We are not sure if the power cycle fixed the solenoid, or if it needed to have no water flowing on it so it could reset itself. Either way, water should be flowing and the north end should be filling again.

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By Zachary, October 14, 2011 9:14 pm

This time, it is an electric problem. It appears that the problem is twofold. First, the water separator is stuck open and draining the north end pool. The only way to fix this is to drain the north end pool, open the separator, and see what’s up. The next problem is that we are unable to fill the north end because the solenoid that controls the fill valve is not receiving power. This may also be the case for the lights, but we are not 100% sure. There will be an electrician in soon to see what is going on. We wanted to see if we could fill the pool manually, but as you could guess, it is better to let the computer take care of it rather than us try to regulate the flow. In the end, we accidentally overflowed the pool.

Presently, the north end is draining/drained. We will attempt to service this as quickly as possible.

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By Zachary, October 6, 2011 10:48 pm

During a two day long adventure, Enlight has been searching for answers relating to why the north end of the fountain (the part closest to W Johnson St.) has been draining. It has drained to the point where there is no water left in the pool and the concrete is starting to dry out! It’s actually a funny story.

You see, many pipes in the underground are labeled the wrong way. There will be arrows showing the direction of flow that lead to other arrows pointing the other way. This does not help us figure things out. We testing pipes for water and eventually got a rather unusual model for how things work. It seems that the north end pool acts as the reservoir for the reservoir that spills back into the pool. If that doesn’t make sense, that’s ok. This is just one of the many quirks.

Anyways, the line that actually feeds into the pool (or reservoir) is opened and closed by a solenoid (or computer controlled water valve). It appears that this solenoid may have died on us, and we need to replace this in order to keep the water flowing. To make matters worse, it appears that a particle separator is stuck in a purge cycle that is causing it to constantly drain water from the pool. With no water entering and water leaving, we are left in a world of hurt. We are hoping to resolve these issues as soon as possible before we have to turn it off for the winter!

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By Zachary, April 9, 2011 9:31 pm

Did you ever realize how hard it is to run a fountain? As the years have gone by, we’ve depended on the senior members of our group to be able to run and understand what is going on. This year was a bit more difficult and took several days to get everything working.

It started off innocently enough. On the north end,we started taking the lights down and checked to make sure that the valves were aligned properly.

Checking the valves

On the north end, we set up the pump to drain the pool. The hoze didn’t exactly want to say on, but we made it anyways.

After the drain, it was shovel, shovel, shovel.

The next task was to clean off the lights in the south end. We noticed that over winter there was a “small” amount of algee growth. It also seemed to accumlate on the lights just a bit. Eric fearlessly cleanred them off with some HCl.

We also took note of some of the damage on the fountain.

Now we could start working on filling the pipes. We set up the bubble tubes, and were greated by drudge.

Yummy!

While the pools filled, Eric wanted them to go faster so he decided to get out the big guns.

We had to wait a while for everything to get ready, so there was plenty of time to relax.

Eventaully the bubble tubes filled with clear water and we got the fountain running for all to enjoy!

Children playing by the fountain

It was only later that we realized that something was wrong. Danielle was walking past the fountain when she noticed that the fountain was only spraying out dribbles. She shut of the pumps and tired to look for what was wrong. We got some people out there to check things out. THe problem appeared to be an open drain. When we had been cleaning the pool, the south end pool drain was opened and never fully shut. We closed the pipe and now everything appears to be running smoothly.

Enjoy the pictures!