It’s been a slow Artoo week. In the last few days we’ve had big storms come through, loosing power for almost a day, 100mph winds and 8 inches of rain. There’s a break in the rain right now so I jumped at the chance to get some painting done this afternoon.

I’ve included some photos, but they”re all starting to look the same to me.

I went back and sanded down the rear skins to clean up the big run I made last time and gave them another coat.

I added an extra coat of white to the skirt and lower frame ring – but they’ll need several more, plus I goofed and put a run on the skirt 🙁

I rubbed down the long doors and the smaller panels and gave them another coat while I was at it. They would have probably been okay, but another coat of paint is always good.

I’ve also been busy work on the new astromech.net website with Wayne and PixelFiend. Stay tuned for some great new features.

Here’s my latest short video tutorial, this time it’s on cutting your inner dome holes.

This was one of the first things I worked on a year ago, and I’ve finally mastered video editing enough to put something like this together.

Enjoy.

Related Posts:

• First Dome Hole Cut

Last week I made a new aluminum dome drive mech to replace the Daren Murrer’s HDPE version I’d been using. There wasn’t much wrong with the one I had to start with, but I gotten it in my head I wanted to try making one myself from aluminum to go with my new dome motor.

The one I created is a combination of Daren’s and the original Atomic Pickle design design. Here’s a photo of my original HDPE mechanism on my aluminum frame.

I used some 1/4″ scrap aluminum that already had a few holes in it, so I had to work around them using the original bracket as the template.

I don’t have a mill at home so everything would have to be either cut on the band saw, Dremeled, drilled or worked by hand tools like a file.

I rough cut the piece on the band saw and drilled the initial holes

The long hole in the center was greater from three smaller holes I’d drilled and filed away to create one big hole.

One issue I knew I would have was making the center hole/cut-out large enough to accommodate the approximate 1″ wide lip/step on on the motor. Also note how the drive shaft is off center due to the gear box.

At first I thought I could file away enough material but it would be slow going. I could also have bought a $40 1″ drill bit but I had another idea. My Dremel has a router attachment that could create a lip on the long slot that I’d created.

I forgot to take photos of the next few steps, but the rest of the mechanism that bolts to the frame is pretty simple, and just two blocks with a few holes in them. I made the main support piece a litte wider than on the Atomic Pickle design as I wanted to add extra support to the main bracket that holds the motor.

Here it is installed in the frame. Note, in some of these photos the motor is flipped the wrong way and the shaft should be toward the center of the frame.

At the pivot point I drilled and installed a bearing like the original Atomic Pickle design, but on hindsight I probably could have just stuck with Daren’s idea of just having a regular hole with a bolt through it.

Here’s the motor position correctly in the bracket

Overall I’m happy with how it came out and given a template and basic tools anyone could make one at home.

Here’s a short video of the new mechanism in action

This is another post I should have written up last week and almost forgot. Better late than never I guess 🙂

I still needed to adjust the ribs on the skirt a bit. When I received the kit the angles on the rib pieces were perfect. But then when I came to attach them to the skirt they need cutting down or filing due to being too long – loosing the nice angle on some of them.

I flipped over my frame and with everything at eye level it was a lot easier to see which one’s needed adjusting.

I just filed the ribs with the skirt resting on top of the frame and my eye dead level with the hand file.

The skirt itself isn’t perfectly flat/level and I think I may end up with a few gaps in spot, but I don’t think you’ll notice once the frame is the correct way up.

Back when I was thinking about stepping up my Pittman dome motor to 24V, and not wanting to have the extra complication of tying two batteries together to make 24V, I’d ordered some small Voltage Converters from ebay to experiment with.

I’m probably not going to install it for the new Dome motor as it’s working fine at 12V, but I do have a 24V supply in the dome for the rear logic lights. This will allow me to have a single 12V battery and save some weight. There is a loss of energy and battery life due to the conversion, but it’s supposed to be in the 90% range.

Update 5/1/08: Andy tipped me off that these board can also be found here.

Some of you may have noticed that I’m now closing each month with a summary of posts. I’ve also gone back and done the same for months with lots of activity.

In addition I’ve added a new link to the menu above called “Archive” which lists all the posts by month and a brief summary where applicable. Hopefully it’ll allow people to find things a little easier.

Don’t forget you can use the category links to the right, and also there’s the tags at the bottom of each post which are also click-able. e.g. There’s a lot of posts for the Pittman motor and each one has the tag which will show all the others.

Happy New Year everyone. Slow day today. Doing some research for my door panels and servos needed.

Been chatting back and forth with Chris Grootjans in Belgium on how he went about it. Here’s a cool video of his setup using micro servos directly attached to the Robart Hinges. I really like the solution because it doesn’t need any extra push rods etc and everything is more self contained.

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Full details of Chris’ setup can be found here.

Right now I’m toying with the idea of just ordering a few mini servos from ebay. Typical cost is $20 shipped for 4 vs buying them domestically where one would cost at least that much. Size is around 22mm x 27mm x 11mm, but I’ve seen them as small as 20x17x9.

Update: I never did receive my servos from china, so buyer beware, the good news PayPal refunded my money.