Here’s a couple of new shots of me and Artoo

We finally got some t-shirts made for the local builders

There’s a bunch of builders blogs out there these days, and if you’re like me it’s hard to keep track of them all. Luckily we have RSS, but even then it’s hard to track down and enter all those addresses.

To help fix the problem I’ve created a consolidated RSS feed containing around 40+ of the builders blogs I track that are focused on droid building. i.e. they post about building progress, techniques, R2 events etc. (rather than lots of Off-Topic posts with a bit of building thrown in.)

The new feed can be found here if you’d like to use it too, or drop me a message if you’d like your blog added

Link: www.artoo-detoo.net/r2rss

If you are included I’d appreciate a link back to my website or maybe a link to the Mega feed.

I also highly recommend Google Reader for all your RSS reading needs.

If you’re going to put any sort of electronics in your droid and new to it, then it’s hard to know where to start. Often you’ll be assembling from a kit.

This is a great primer on circuit building, it cover the basics from recommended tools, how to correctly solder and what order you should do things in.

Instructable.com has a lot of great articles that most droid builders could use.

Link

As I was reassembling Artoo last night I took the time to weigh some assembled pieces as they went on.

Remember my droid is almost all aluminum and steel, and there’s always a lot of debate among builders about material and saving weight, so I thought it maybe good to report in on how things break down.

I did a weigh in last summer on my partially completed, but functional droid, and he came in at 155lb with the dome. I was expecting a big increase but was pleasantly surprised.

Each leg, including the foot, motor, motor mount, wheel, caster, battery box, hoses, wiring and the detail pieces comes in at is 32lb. I didn’t have the horse shoe or booster cover, and I’m guessing I could add another 5-7lb per leg for those.

The body/frame with the skins, internal battery hold, center leg mount, electronics and the detail pieces comes in at 50lb. This does not include the batteries. I was surprised it wasn’t more considering a raw JAG 4 aluminum frame is roughly 30lb.

Center leg with casters and detail pieces was 14lb.

The body has three 12V 7Ah batteries, totaling 10.5lb.

Give a total of around 153lb for everything but the dome, which is unchanged at 17lb and includes a single 1lb 12V 2.2Ah battery.

So I’ve gone from a 155lb to a 170lb droid which isn’t bad. I’m going to double check with a bathroom scale tomorrow, as I’m really surprised it wasn’t more.

Another quick post. It’s been a very long night but I’ve finally got Artoo’s back together and running around.

This is the first time he’s actually looked like R2-D2, I kinda miss the raw aluminum look but I’m super excited to finally get to this stage in the project.

I still need to fix and add a few minor things for WonderCon on Saturday, but if I had to do an event right now we’d be set to go.

I’m heading to bed to try and catch up on some sleep while R2 charges in the garage overnight.

Another long weekend with late nights rushing to get R2 done for WonderCon.

I thought I’d take a break and post a few quick photos of where I’m at. I’m pretty sure I’ll have Artoo back together by Friday, it’s now down to deciding what do work on and what to leave out for now.

All the electronics and RC stuff have been upgraded and re-installed in the body with an all new wiring design. The charging system works a treat, and I can even run him off 120V when he’s parked up somewhere.

Legs and feet are also done waiting to be put back on, but before I can do that I need to finish up a few things inside the body.

Tonite I’m fighting the back door which is the last big annoyance that I need to work around. I was hoping to use magnets to secure it, but it’s not really working out too great. They hold it on fine, but it’s the alignment I’m not happy with, and there’s a balance between using strong magnets that take up a lot of space and block access to my swing out electronics panel (which lets me get at the batteries), or using smaller one’s that don’t quite hold well enough and don’t pull the door tight to the body or sags in spots that spoil everything.

I’ve got a feeling I may end up using screws or just leaving it off for the event.

Sorry for the lack of detail tonite, I promise to go back and cover all the work I’ve been doing the last few weeks 🙂

This is short video of Gary Weaver’s aluminum R2 that inspired so many of to start building. Someone posted the videos on the Builders Group today, and I thought I’d pulled together this little montage.

It may not seem that impressive today as droids are a dim a dozen, but this was built many years ago and he helped pioneered the way for all us aluminum junkies. I can clearly remember Gary posting regular updates on the Replica Prop Forum and thinking to myself that I’d never have the patients, the skils or the money to pull something like that off 🙂