This morning I was told my Mr. Crane that our new NUC, UPS, and keyboard arrived. As I had a free first I went into the office and unboxed everything! CyberPower UPS This will be used to power the whole S.A.R.T control console, it was the best option we could think because we have items...Read More
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...Read More
3/3/2017 – 21:21 Sit Rep: I started printing the robot chassis with no raft about ~1/2 hour ago. It looked good for the first 10 minutes and then the printer head obviously hit one of those sensors on the side of the chassis. This screwed up the printer head alignment and caused the printer to “think”...Read More
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...Read More
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...Read More
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...Read More
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...Read More
Today I needed to use the Xacto knife that we keep in the IT staff room, as I was using it I thought to myself, I should print a small cap for this as the blade could cut someone. I went online to look for a 3D Print file, I found this one here. I...Read More
Today I began redesigning the chassis for the new robot. After discussing with Mr Elias, I had a few changes to the original design – the servos would be rotated 180 degrees to make enough room for the NUC, battery and voltage/current regulator. The servos were rotated along an axis that intersected the centre of...Read More
Today as I was walking into the student services hub to go home, I was approached by none other than Mr. Crane as we have been somewhat bugging him about the “Music Room” he told me that we had the go-ahead to move in, so I dropped all plans to go home just so I could...Read More
