Love how busy the forum is at the moment. Warms the cockles of my heart so it do.
While continuing the tidal wave of personal improvement I have been making (relatively) blistering progress on Mr Nips.
Limit switches have been hooked up on the actuator and it’s moving pretty well. I just refused the stock switches which hopefully isn’t a massive mistake. I did however hook them up properly to the BBB esc. No pissing about with diodes here, path of least resistance and all that - Hey, that’s nearly an electronics pun! Gosh I’m funny sometimes.
Continuing on that theme I neatened up the main nugget of the brain of the robot. Yet another shameless shout out to BBB for including dynamically sizable biodegradable electrical isolating pads completely free of charge with every order. This lil card tab goes under the Rx to stop it shorting when it’s heatshrunkeded into one tight tumour.
As previously mentioned it just sits in the seat of the robot’s trousers in a fairly neat little bracket. The motors just plug in down the side and the battery dodges the actuator and goes pretty much directly in, save for a gooseneck out on the positive side so I can sling the switch somewhere sensible. The actuator ESC is bravely mounted to the motor bodies with hubris and zip ties. The signal wire is just joined with a header pin but I might swap it to a bullet connector for a little more security.
I started prepping the motors to get them as good as possible - in the last version the drive was pretty pitiful. One of the main reasons was flex causing inconsistent mesh and the pinions being on threads rather than a proper shaft. I reduced the motor output to 4mm and stuck a brass sleeve over that for them 5mm bore pinion gear. There is a stub shaft that is also put in place which gets a little bearing as a treat.
Potentially this is now an over constrained mess instead of unsupported nightmare but if you don’t go too far you’ll never go far at all.
I cooked up a pair of tyres and made myself a little belt. The other bulkhead is printing as I type and some more tyres are curing vibrantly in the corner so I’m tentatively planning to have a little drive by the end of the week.