I replaced the failed Pittman dome motor last night, and thought I’d post some pictures of the failed gearbox.

The pen tip is pointing to the failed gear in the center of the picture. The teeth are almost stripped flat.

And this is the new motor opened up and how the gearbox should look. Again the gear in question is in the center of the shot. Notice the teeth!

I’m not confident that it will not fail again, and I may need to look at an alternative. I’m hoping the issue was my failed attempt to use batting tape to line the dome bearing to help with traction, but the gear may have been slowly failing with the constant harsh stop/starts on such a small gear. I know of at least one other builder that had a Pittman dome motor fail in the exact same spot.

I finally got a chance to fully test out my slip ring last night with some servos.

I first had to finish soldering up my little boards that would handle signal routing and power.

Rather than try and explain in words and pictures how the setup works I made this short video to try and give a good overview and show the slip ring in action.

I still need to make little brackets to secure the D sockets to the boards, and decide the best place to locate them in Artoo.

See Also:

• Electrical System Update
• Slip Ring Spin Test
• Slip Ring – Cutting the Frame
• Slip Ring Update
• Slip Rings
• Variable 12-24V Converter

I’m busy getting ready for Makers Faire and printed off this vinyl banner yesterday for the booth at the event.

It’s approx. 36″ x 60″, and Artoo is almost full size. It’s based on graphic used at the last few SW Celebrations. Thanks Cory for giving me permission to use it.

I plan on making a stand out of PVC to mount it on.

And Gerard will have his tall C-4 banner there too.

Here’s a videos I just found on YouTube of our appearance at WonderCon this year.

I stripped my first set of gears in a motor this weekend. I was goofing around on the driveway showing Artoo to some neighbors across the street when suddenly the dome stopped working. I heard this really bad crunching noise then a very quiet motor spinning.

I quickly pulled him into the workshop and the dome off to see what was up.

A couple of months ago I had lined the inside track of my dome bearing with some batting tape to help the dome wheel grip. It had been slipping and the resulting noise was very annoying. The tape seemed to be the perfect solution …… until the gearbox failed.

I think what had happened was I’d left R2 sitting in the van all day and when I finally unloaded him the glue on the tape had heated up and when I started to spin the dome it balled up – jamming the wheel and breaking the gearbox.

Gerard had a similar failure trying to fix the squeaky slipping wheel. He’d over tightened the tension spring which stopped the dome the moment the motor stopped – but again this put extra pressure on the gears in the Pittman motor causing them to fail.

So for now I’m back to having a squeaky dome.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been busy getting Artoo back together for a couple of important events. I’ve totally overhauled the electrical system (again) and I’m hoping this will be it for a while.

At the hospital visit on Saturday I ran Artoo for about 4-5 hours on the new system and the 18Ah batteries without any sign of slow down, and I continued to run him again the next day for few more hours on the same charge. I must admit that I didn’t do lots of long sprints, but I’m confident that my earlier battery problems are fixed.

With that said, here’s a summary of the electrical work and the new electrical system design.

The following schematic outlines the 3 main areas of my setup. The red area is the front charging port, flashing LEDs and the battery select/on/off switch. Yellow is the wiring harness/relays that does all the magic of switch batteries between charing mode or running the droid, and finally the blue on the right is the rear electrical panel containing the speed controllers, fuse block, battery monitor, and power distribution board. It also contains an additional relay/power jack to run the drive from 120VAC/12VDC adapter.

There’s also a PDF version that maybe easier for printing.

Here’s a photo of the battery select relay/wiring harness (yellow section of the schematic). It uses 3 automotive relays to do the battery switching for charging and to turn Artoo on and off.

I attached the wiring harness to the battery holder using a small bracket

And here’s the new batteries in place

This is the front charing port (red section on the schematic) you’ve probably seen before. The attaced board to the right is the PICAXE controller that flashes the lights when the front door opens, and the smaller board to the left just contains a 7805 5VDC regular to power the PICAXE. The wiring harness above connects to to the charging socket.

In addition to adding the extra relays to switch two sets of batteries, I replaced the large MAXI fuse block/voltage display with a much smaller ATO fuse block and a separate LED voltage meter display.

I mounted the voltage meter on the rear electrical panel, and instead of using one for each of the batteries I decided to use just one with a switch to flip between batteries. The board requires a separate 5VDC supply to operate and I got this from the power distribution board.

Here’s the new rear panel. Going clockwise, top left is the battery monitor, then the Vex Micro-controller and receiver, below that is the power distribution board, and below that the fuse block, to the left the RoboteQ AX3500 speed controller for the drive motors, and above that the Syren10 speed controller which turn the dome.

I also worked on getting the slip ring soldered up and installed.

And I made up little boards for it to plug into. 12VDC power is connected to the blue terminal block, and the control/servo cables on the 3 pin connectors.

There a very similar board in the dome, but with an additional 5VDC input from a 7805 regulator IC to power the servos.

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

Artoo, myself and members of the Rebel Legion’s Endor Base visited Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital yesterday.

It was a great day and Artoo was a big hit with the children and adults alike. This is definitely something I want to do again.

Unfortunately we don’t have many photos as camera weren’t allowed around the children for privacy, but we did take this quick shot at the end of the afternoon.