I spent five hours designing and all I got was this lousy t-shirt?

Man, a t-shirt for this class would be almost totally awesome.

Here's my utterly belated blog post.  Two weeks ago Eric and I spent some interesting hours trying to get adobe illustrator to make us a gear with the right diameter with teeth that didn't overlap, or drift off of the perimeter of the circle, or leave giant gaps in between each tooth.  To say the least, it was a particularly difficult task for the two of us.

Eric was just super excited that our latest degree of rotation attempt was unsuccessful.  Super excited.

To put our motor into the frame, Eric and I talked about Placing the motor at one extreme end of the frame, using an attachment to fix a 1/4" diameter, stainless steel rod to the motor, and using this self lubricating plastic (the name of which I've forgotten on three different occasions, this very moment included) to stabilize and attach the rod to the frame.  Small gears would be welded to the rod, we figured that two of these small gears, unless in testing we discover we need a third, would be sufficient points of contact for the gears on the mobile plane.  The motor would rotate the rod and the small gears, forcing the second plane, and the half gears attached to the second plane, to rotate.  This would give us the articulation we need in each of the five joints.

Our motor drivers were not handled with care. Crushed capacitors do not a motor driver make.  Fortunately the company sent us new ones almost lickity split.  Unfortunately one of the dual driver boards does not work at all.  Hopefully we can find a way to replace or repair it!

One of the planes of our lovely frame!  Good work team welding!

Perfectly sized for the motors and mounting.

Instead of just having some gears floating around as our gear prototype, Eric suggested scoring the cross section onto acrylic and using the motor and gears on the acrylic to show how the gears fit into the system.

I think it's quite lovely.

Watching the milling machine make our LED pixel boards (each small board accomodates 4 LEDs, red, green, blue, and white, which creates a pixel), was probably one of the more exciting things for me in this project. I soldered our LED control board, and when the small circuit boards were finally finished, Eric and I spent some hours soldering LEDs onto the boards, and testing them.  All in all a pretty fun day/evening (4pm-1am), listening to music, soldering, watching movies, soldering, more movies, testing boards, and soldering.  I love that I get to play around with things that you'd typically see in an eecs robotics design class, definitely not a materials science senior design.

So cool!

Just for fun I thought I'd include a picture of my adventure into the steam tunnels of an area and school that will remain unnamed.  I should probably remain mum as to how I got into them, but it's safe to say I went from one end of central to the extreme other end, without ever leaving these tunnels.

It was awesome!