August 2012

Me getting hit in the face. Enjoy: Meh… Fabrication is so exciting for me. I can build something that looks great… but a sexy appearance doesn’t assure a working robot. That’s the compromise between technology and aesthetics. Its been thundering and raining out so naturally the crazed engineer in me surfaced tonight. I was controlling the mini delta again with the GUI just to see if I could maybe figure out some way to smooth its movement… but one of the motors ended up murdering itself. I could hear the clicking sound of death and then the whining of stripped gears came shortly after: The one thing I did learn is that there is nothing wrong with my wiichuk or the adapter. It runs perfectly fine with my old prototype. So this points the failure at the mini servos themselves I believe. Weird. While the new (not shitty) motors ship,…

Ok… So I wired up my completed mini delta this morning. Everything was looking swell until I ran the code, and with one energetic swoop… all the arms fell off. That was fine, I had to screw them into the motors, right… no biggie. After I did this I ran the code again only to realize that the mini motors from Hong Kong weren’t exactly up to par. They work alright but are jittery as hell. My robot looks like it has Parkinson’s. Damn it. Let us take a moment to mourn on behalf of this setback with some pictures of me making light of the situation:

Today I went to a real hardware store. Not Home Depot and not a hobby shop… but a place that has isle upon isle of bits and pieces mysterious and unknown to me. It was here that I solved my connection conundrum… I found 2-56 size washers, nuts, screws, and threaded rods ftw. These are all the things I needed to get robot into one piece. I had everyone in the store on their toes, but I learned a bunch and saved money too. I win! Connecting the servo paddles to the swivel ball joints: To do this I cut inch long pieces of threaded rod and pushed them through the ball end of the joints. I then used washers as spacers and put nuts on the ends to keep things from slipping around. I created another ‘triangle’ from a plastic togo box and mounted my LED housing (little container…

I realize it’s been a while since my last post. Now that my summer vacation is over I can focus once more on my bots and post the progress reports I’ve neglected to do. Yay! It took weeks of waiting but my mini motors finally arrived in the mail (which was actually about two weeks ago). The package was stamped from Hong Kong so I guess that explains why it took so long to get here. They are even smaller than I imagined. Aren’t they cute? So far I’ve Attached the arms (that I cut from the black plastic hangers) to the mini servos: I cut the clearance slots for the arms into the base and installed the motors as so. Note that I attached plastic tabs to the motors with plastic glue in order to have a large enough surface area to screw them onto the base: …And repeated the…