Slow month, but here’s a summary anyway

• Dome Bumps / Switches
• C4 Photo and Video Round-up
• Couple of shots from C4
• Back from C4 – R2 Lives!

My dome has a self contained power system, and I wanted to use the dome bumps as switches. Rather than re-invest the wheel I decided to copy what Victor had already done as it looked like a great solution.

The switches are from Radio Shack, Part #275-693. The original surrounds on the switches are square’ish and need rounding.

Here’s the switches before and after sanding. I carefully spun them against a bench sander to remove the corners.

Here they are all painted and ready to install

There is a catch to painting them. You basically have to do it twice because once you flip the switch it exposes an area that the paint can’t reach on the first pass.

Next up I had to drill out the inner and outer dome for the switches, but the drill bit I had wasn’t quite big enough so I had to fill down the last bit to get a good fit.

Leading up to C4 I did a lot of building and I didn’t have time to record things here. I’m hoping in the next few weeks to play catch up and post pictures along with decisions and mistakes that were made. Stay tuned.

Here’s a list of photo albums from various builders at C4 – Updated 7/12/07

Chris James
Oliver Steeples
Victor Franco
Tim Goldenburg
Jeff Barnes
PixelFiend
William Miyamoto
Andy Schwartz
Jerry Greene
Jesper Laursen
ATM/ShackMan
Ray Sanders
Vincent Sanchez

Official SW Blog R2 Builders Flickr Pool
SW Action News Flickr C4 Pool (not an R2 Builders gallery but lots of great droid photos)

Video –

Official SW Blog – Astromechs in Action
Droid Races (Spike TV)
Droid Races
Droid Parade (Phil Wise)
Droid Parade 2 (Darth Will)
Chip Luck on CBS
Droid Races Crash
My Lost C4 Interview

Here’s a few more photos from C4. First up the group picture after the droid parade.

Here’s a video of the parade itself

Next up, me in the replica Tantive IV hallway

and finally me driving R2 around

I’m back from C4 and R2 performed really well.

I was able to finish the basic structure, the dome, the electronics and he was fully RC’d and running around most all of the days at the con. As you can see I also fixed the dome and got most of the blue painting done. Battery life was excellent and the Roboteq AX3500 speed controller / NPC-2212 combo worked out great. I was in both races and the little guy far exceeded my expectations of what I thought I’d be able to do at C4.

This is me driving back to the hotel on the last evening ready for transport back to the Bay Area – Yes I drove him home 1/2 mile to the hotel without incident.

I still need to sort through my photos and upload them and post a full write-up, but wanted to post something other than having my dented dome as the top post in the blog 🙂

I also intend on going back and catch up with blog posts on all the building I did before I left.