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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, July 13, 2012 12:29 pm

Feeling left out of Enlight? Thinking that the summer is just too long to go without your fellow Enlighters around? Want to know what’s going on down below while you’re gone? Well, we finally have our network camera up and running!

Go here to view (see login information sent via email to Enlight members): http://enlight.engr.wisc.edu/fountain-crio-8069/

For your viewing convenience, we have set up a public guest account, of which you will have received login information if you are a member or Alumnus of the Enlight Fountain Control Group.

***Please Note*** Multiple people can log in at the same time – and since the camera is interactive, please don’t be alarmed if the camera’s view “jumps” while you’re logged in.

Have fun, but don’t all log in at once!

In other news, we had an attempted visit by one of our past Presidents, Mr. Jason Malinowski. Unfortunately, we were experiencing some down time, so he didn’t get to see the fountain at our best – but hopefully he will come back sometime soon to visit.

TODO:
We have noticed multiple air lines have begun to pop/crack, one of our trusty (but rusty) grate hooks cracked in half, and some screws in the North end have literally disintergrated. …Basically, work is never done for Enlight!

Til next time!

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By Zachary, December 11, 2011 4:24 pm

There are many times and cases when the fountain (unfortunately) needs to be shutdown. Prior to now, we have been depending on only one or two members to remember how to turn everything on and off. This is not a good way to ensure the continued survival of the fountain. Thankfully, we have captured the entire experience on tape! While the entire thing is only about 14 minutes long, the entire process will take between one and two hours. We hope that this video will make the jobs of future Enlighters a little bit easier.

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By Zachary, November 30, 2011 11:14 pm

We are bringing back the blinking lights!

Last time, we spiraled lights up around the north end and placed lights around the inside of the south end. This time, we will be leaving the south end lit only by the lights in the pool and the north end will have random blinking lights.

The above image is very important to using and understanding the north end lights. Inside of the gray box is an Arduino that is programmed to randomly turn on and off the lights (code here). The physical box is set up to receive power from two locations. First, the Ethernet cable that plugs into the board supplies power to the Arduino. The wires are labeled with scotch tape. V+ is the positive and GND is the negative. It runs on about 5V. The main power cable attaches to the bundle of green wires and the single back wire. [Ed note: You'll have to figure out which is positive and negative. I'm just a lowly CS student] This cable should run on 120V.

With all of this ready to go, we should have all of the lights working by 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!