Convento Dei Cappuccini Carini

Phew. Today was full. Zoë and I woke up early to go on a run through some back streets in our town just outside of Carini (in the province of Palermo, Sicily). We meandered through all of the tiny little roads in search of an entrance to the enormous mountains situated nearby, but had no luck. Oh well, we have another half a week to try other roads. When we got back the group was up and ready to rock. We joined up, had breakfast, and loaded into the bus.

On the ride over to the first cistern, our Maltese friend Keith told us loads of information about our cultural research projects: namely gun control laws, engineering degrees from University of Malta, Maltese agriculture and horticulture, and some neat facts about the cisterns that we are deploying into. Keith is a graduate student at University of Malta studying archaeology, and is working on his Ph.D. He's a brilliant guy and we're grateful to have him accompanying us.


When we arrived, we hauled all of the equipment out of the van and crossed the street to the site. There was a horse standing around that distracted everyone for a bit before we set all of the equipment up. After getting the generator running and plugging the robot into the control box, we left the gear to take a small tour of the land from our Sicilian archaeologist friend Toto. He showed us some nearby water storage features that might tell us a little bit more about the cistern that we were deploying into. I walked back to the equipment and waited around for the others to do the same. Once we were all there, we booted up and deployed the robot into the well. The water level was too low to drive around or collect SONAR data (our SONAR was acting sporadically at the time anyways), so we just dropped the robot down and recorded video and depth.

We packed everything up, said goodbye to the horse, and got on our way to the next cistern. This one was located in a small city on top of a large mountain behind our hotel. The cistern was situated in a church courtyard, so we headed through the town and into the church to unpack.


At this point, SONAR was still working intermittently, so we deployed the robot, got a single scan that covered the entire simple bell shaped cistern, and drove around to get images for Tim's stereo imaging project. We did a bit of troubleshooting with the SONAR but had no luck. After packing all the gear up, we had some pizza down town, and drove back to the hotel.

When we arrived, our professors told Tyler, Brent, and I to run through a permutations chart with some sort of logical flow to get the SONAR working before the huge water gallery tomorrow. While we were developing a method that would find the misbehaving piece of equipment in the smallest number of permutations, Tyler fixed the problem (see post below). 15 minutes. Here is the most satisfying and least painful permutations chart ever documented:


PHEW. It works. We coded for a bit, had a 2 and a half hour dinner/fun conversation, and now we're headed to bed.