By

Jack Williams
17
Mar

Rebranding

The site we got our original logo from updated their commercial use license, meaning we need to update our logo. Fortunately, this gives us the chance to put some more thought and effort into it! Here’s our old logo. It represents innovation and synergy and empowerment… Yeah. It doesn’t really represent us. We had some other designs,...
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16
Mar

Cable Management

After the excitement of Christmas wore off, we started to fit all the items into the case. We discovered that some of the new items were larger than reported online, and thus everything didn’t fit perfectly inside the Treka-700 case. Fortunately, we have another option. We’ve switched around the roles of our cases, meaning the...
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05
Mar

Unboxing

Our new toys have arrived in the mail! Dynamixel AX-18A Servos We’ve purchased 4 AX-18A servos from Dynamixel. Apparently, these are the “next step up” from the popular AX-12A servos, which we were actually using for the S.A.R.T v1. The website states they offer nearly twice the speed and 15% more torque. Our old servos...
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03
Mar

USB2AX Plan

Our two USB2AX dynamixel servo interfaces arrived in the mail today. We purchased these as they’re a far smaller alternative to the USB2Dynamixel (see image below) or the OpenCM board. We also don’t have to mess around with another layer of code (as we would on the OpenCM) – communication is direct. After reading the...
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02
Mar

Power to the NUC

Powering our expensive components has always been something we put off to the end, because if it’s not done properly you’re likely to blow something up. Fortunately, we have a fire extinguisher right outside our office, so we can begin to put some thought into the power supply.   Today, Matthew and Riley were discussing...
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01
Mar

Preliminary Prototype Print Problems Post (Pictures Provided)

The purpose of printing a prototype chassis was to check if there were any small issues, and thankfully we’ve found some, otherwise we’d have nothing to improve on! Here’s a short list of all the things (good and bad) I noticed when fitting all the hardware for a test. There’s a lot more space in...
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28
Feb

Printing Process and First Print!

If you saw our last blog, you would know that we have had some 3D printer troubles over the last couple of days. We discovered that the issue was the SD card reader in the 3D printer that was causing the issue. Fortunately, the MakerBot has another way to print – via USB. The MakerBot...
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24
Feb

Ultimate Power System!

In order for the S.A.R.T to be truly portable, the control panel needs to be portable too. We can’t have it tethered to a power cord, so we need to think batteries. Big batteries. Or, more accurately, big batteries in a small case. The computer-hardware-savvy among you would have realised that the title of this...
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22
Feb

Briefcase Brief

This morning, Aaron and I walked into the IT staff room to find a pleasant surprise. A shiny new TREKA 700 plastic case was sitting on the desk. I started taking putting everything we needed into the case to test out placement and cable management. We’re going to have to get some shorter cables (or...
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21
Feb

FTP: Fix That Panel!

After the Great Permissions Blunder of 2017, the robot was shut down over the weekend. Initially I thought this could cause issues as processes would not be able to access certain files when they started. Surprisingly, there were absolutely no issues on boot. A quick test told us that the video stream and S.A.R.T Interface...
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