Blog

Busy, busy

"Fun" projects have taken a back burner for several months. And that's OK. I've been busy homeschooling my two boys, and they've been doing great--currently working a grade ahead and getting great grades. We're having a lot of fun in the process, so it isn't that life's necessities aren't just as "fun" as other things, but we do have to set priorities. So, as the moment, I haven't touched the DSKY in some time, and the PiUPS boards are sitting waiting for me to get time to solder on some of the impossibly-small SMD components.

New Year, New and Old Projects

Well, I'm starting off the New Year 2019 with a bang! The Prusa is, as I write this, hard at work printing the pieces of a Storm Trooper helmet. Why? Because I can. No better reason needed. I just thought it would be something cool to make, and I really have never done any serious finishing of 3D-printed parts, just used them as they came off the printer. I'm sure much will be learned.

Post-Photo Booth

Within a week of packing the Halloween Photo Booth up for the year, two ideas were realized in circuit form. The first is what I am calling LightShow16, a 16-channel hardware PWM LED driver board. The second is PiUPS, a UPS for Raspberry Pi.

First DSKY Video

I did a video about my DSKY progress so far, and posted it on YouTube. I've got to work on my production values, for sure. I shot the video with a Samsung handheld digital video camera, but it's only a 720P cheapie that I had bought a couple of years ago on sale at the blue-and-yellow retailer for my kids to play with.

More Parts

I just ordered the flat pack for the Scavenger drives from Big Blue Saw. This seems an easy approach to getting strong, fast feet: the drives use the same E3-150 motors as the more expensive Warp Drives, and omni-wheels can also be used to improve turning and spinning. A set of warp drives costs $1080 currently, but all in with parts, the Scavengers should come in around $450, and that difference buys a lot of other parts.

Week of June 11 - Distractions

A lot got done this week, but not on the DSKY or R2D2 that has much to show. I got a wild hair to implement a new Vera plugin, called Reactor, to address an ongoing gap in Vera's logic for triggering events. The core of that was pretty simple, but the UI has some persnickety details that took quite a bit of time to comb out. You have to love jQuery, though.

A big week for small steps

This past week has been a series of steps and missteps, as with any project, but the net is firmly forward. On the design side, I spent quite a bit of time this week getting to understand parameterization in Fusion 360, and started applying it to the model. I also did a lot of optimization of recurring elements in the design. So, future tweaks as I get new and better information on dimensions and details will be easier to apply.

Uh oh...

I had done enough reading on the Astromech.net web site to know that I was undertaking a big project, and one that might never "end," but I'm beginning to think there's a more sinister aspect of this project I hadn't fully considered.