It’s been a long evening and I spent most of it working on my Front Logic Display. It’s something I’ve been putting off for months hoping it would either go away or a work around to my problem would magically come to me.

The problem is that my aluminum surround from Doug Olson does not fit the cool front logic electronics without going through some major surgery.

The surround is a one piece design and looks great, but it’s very precise in the way it fits. The more traditional two piece surrounds people had been using are more forgiving and you could angle the boards away from each other to get it things to fit.

So as I said, I’ve been avoiding taking my soldering iron to the delicate circuit boards for months, but it had to be done and tonight was the night. Without it I’m totally blocked on the dome. Luckily I only needed to separate one of the pair of boards.

I think if someone was still offering the front logic electronics then I wouldn’t have been so fearful of screwing things up, but I didn’t have the luxury of being able to fall back and simply buy a new set.

It took me hours to get it done and the good news is they still worked at the end. I’m not going to go into the hack job I did in fear that somebody may copy my method. But the tools used were soldering iron with a nice new tip, a de-soldering pump, one of those helping hand gripping thing and finally a small pair of pliers/wire-cutter.

Tomorrow I’ll get the surround fitted to the dome.

So, without further ado I present my new improved logics –

Click here for photos on Doug’s website of the logic board the surround.

I received my dome drive system today and I’ve already gotten it installed and working. I still need to wire it up to a speed controller, but that should be relatively easy and I’ll work on it tonight when I make the frames electronics mounting panel.

With all the dome work yesterday I had time to think about it’s electronics and how I’m going to lay things out.

I’ve seen some people bond the dome ring to the dome, but I don’t think it’s such a good idea for me. For one I’m using the dome base plate that supports the periscope, and I’m thinking I’ll attach other things to it as well. The base plate is also bigger than the ring and it restricts access from the underside, so there would be no way to get in and fix a lot of things.

So the dome will split in two and I know have the dilemma that I’ll need decide where to put some things, either in the base or up in the dome, and then worry about running wires. For example, only the lift mech needs to attach to the dome plate, and it makes sense to put the weighty batteries down there too.

Initially the dome will contain the following this that are powered

• Power Distribution Board – 12v in, 9v, 6v, 12v out
• Front Logic -9v
• Rear Logic – 24v
• PSI’s- 9v x 2
• Holo Projector Lights – 12v x 3
• Vex Controller for Periscope Lift Mech – 6v
• Batteries – 2 x 12v
• Lift Mech Speed Controller – 12v

Later on I’ll be adding a few servos attached to the panels.

I think I’m going mount most everything on the dome base plate and run 3 power lines up into the dome with quick release.

Here’s a rough idea on layout

Today was dome day…. Actually it was almost the entire weekend, but “Day of the Dome” sounded so much better than “Dome Weekend”.

I’ve made a lot more progress in the last few days and more confident that I can get the dome glued together in the next week or so ready for C4.

I’ve had a long list of to-do’s for the dome and been putting things off waiting for other bits to fall into place. The frame was holding me up for the longest time. Now that it’s pretty much done I could go back and work on the dome.

I installed Rockler bearing a week ago and it’s working great now after a few tweaks. One of the issues was the damn dome ring again. I thought I’d seen the last of problems with it, but the inner circle that’s tack welded on the inside is all warped/wavy so when I put it on the bearing the dome ducks up and down as it spins. Luckily I had to bolt the periscope life mech dome base plate to it and it helped level it off. It still needs tweaking but I’ll wait till the I have the skins on.

On Friday night and Saturday morning I decided to tackle fixing a wiring problem in my periscope lift mech rather than sending it back to Daniel. He kindly offered to fix it but it would mean that I would be delayed again from working on dome stuff.

I removed and disassembled the Delrin block holding the switches on Friday night, and a quick test showed that diodes had blown. I had to wait till Saturday morning for Radio Shack to open, but the good news was the new diodes were only 89 cents and about and 30 minutes work to get installed.

Next up was a bunch of fixes to the holes I’d cut in the inner dome a few months ago. When I first cut them I had the older aluminum Holo Projectors and resin Front and Rear Surrounds. Well now I have new HP’s and aluminum Surrounds, and everything was a tad bit bigger and I needed to tweak the holes.

I used a bottle wrapped in sandpaper to widen the HP holes.

I also had to adjust the hole for the new Rear Logic.

Notice I’ve yet to cut the rear panels from the dome. I’m still using them as a guide to make sure everything while line up with the holes on the inner dome. I’ll probably cut them out this week now that I’m happy with the fit.

Next up was the dome ring. I needed to cut some notches in it to allow the PSI and HP’s to sit flush with the dome. I marked, dremel and filed out where I needed to the space.

I decide to tackle the periscope housing next even though I have a new aluminum one coming in the next few weeks. The PVC kit was still in pieces on my workbench but I really needed it to figure out how much bigger I needed to make the dome pie panel hole I’d miss sized a few months ago. So I quickly tacked it together with super glued and installed it on the now working lift mech.

Once done this allowed me to go back and adjust the dome pie panel hole that was too small. This is a real bad picture, but I’m trying to show that the periscope now passes through the opening without any problem. I’ll try and take some better pictures tomorrow.

At this point I almost started to cut the remaining holes in the dome, but decided to finish the PVC periscope kit and add a lens. I’d already done a lot of work on it in morning and I was so close to getting it done. Finishing it up would have two advantages, 1) I can make sure that it really does fit after squaring off the edges, and 2) if the aluminum one is delay at least I have a backup for C4.

For the lense I cut out a small square of acrylic and then rough sanded it into shape with my bench sander. I really should have used a thicker block, but all I had was 1/8″ acrylic. It really didn’t take long, so I may go back and make another later this week.

The fit was good

Next I marked out where I needed to sand down on the bench sander. Please be careful that you don’t push your fingers into the disk!

Here it is after I’ve sanded down the edges. Not pretty but I wanted to show how you can go from rough piece of plastic to something shiny in a matter of moments.

Here it is after some quick sanding through various grades of paper

And then polished up on my bench grinder with a polish wheel.

Next up was sanding and bondo’ing the housing ready for painting.

Almost done. I applied a layer of undercoat, sanded and undercoated again.

In the morning I’ll probably sand an prime again before trying the top white coat.

I also need to glue and pain the resin riser pieces, but I should be done tomorrow night. I can then think about adding the LEDs.

Things are moving forward fast now that I have the basic outline of a frame done. I’d been putting off a lot of things waiting on it, including installing the Rockler Bearing/Lazy Susan.

I decided to leave the original plastic wrapper on while I drilled the holes, and I also pulled back the plastic and taped off the area on both sides where I would be drilling to make doubly sure nothing would get inside the bearing and lock it up later.

First Problem – I tried to align it inside the dome ring using the tried and tested method of using coins to center it, but there was an issue. If you’ve been following my progress and have a good memory you’ll remember that the dome ring wall varies in thickness. On the outside it’s perfectly round, but on the inside it varies a lot, making it hard to use coins to center the bearing in place.

Using some calipers I figured out 4 spots where I though the wall thickness seemed to be close enough and placed my coins there. It wasn’t perfect, and I was repeatedly tweaking and re-measuring for the longest time. In the end 3 nickels and a one cent taped together seemed to do the trick. They weren’t tight tight, so I used some clamps to lock the bearing in place while I drilled.

Drilling into the dome ring went fine and I don’t think I got any metal shaving in the bearing. After that, and in short order I popped out the little plastic lugs and drilled out the outer bearing ring holes to attach it to the frame.

I still need to attach Daniels inner dome plate and get slightly longer screws that attach the Rockler to the dome, but that’s an easy fix.

Darren Murrer has been working on some new laser cut domes for the group, and today he’s at the machine shop getting them laser cut.

He setup a webcam for us all to watch live, and I grabbed a few stills and put them together into this animation.

Enjoy.

I did some further testing of the periscope lift mech tonite. Got it partially installed in the dome. Just placed inside on the dome plate to see how much room I had to play with all around.

I was hoping I’d have enough space in there to add a small servo to rotate the periscope as the mech only raises and lowers – But it really doesn’t look like I’ll have the room.
I also need to widen the hole in the dome as the periscope housing touches in several spots.

I think things will improve once I get the housing glued together and more square, but this was a good test to make sure I’m on the right track.

I’m going to sleep on it tonite and try and figure how I can get the thing to rotate – even if it’s just 90 degrees.

As it lowers you can see that it touches the dome.

Big milestone for me tonight. I finally got around to wiring up my dome periscope lift mech to a speed controller and my VexLabs RC setup.

This is my first time wiring up anything like this, so I was a bit apprehensive. The good news is I didn’t pop anything and it worked first time.

I was really surprised on how fast the little motor spun the mech up and down. So fast that the threaded rod squeals a bit. I may have to program in limits on the controller to cap the max speed.

Here’s a quick photo of the test setup and a video

For the test I used a SyRen10 Speed Controller.