New Battery Holder

I really am building honest and Artoo is back on the workbench.

I’ve revised my battery charging system and in the process of making a new harness for the larger batteries. I’m also reworking my fuse system, so basically everything had to come out. This may look like a mess, but I know where everything goes back honest!

The new battery harness is designed it in such a way that I can mix my old 7ah batteries  and the newer 18ah. I added a little arm that folds out and holds the smaller battery when needed.

Here it is with mixed 18ah and 7ah batteries in place

Arm out of the way and two 18ah batteries this time

Tonite I’m hoping to finish up the re-wiring.

Posted by Chris on April 16th, 2008 in Electronics | Comments Off on New Battery Holder

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Attaching Battery Harnesses

Another quick post with old work, this time on how I attached the battery harnesses to the boxes.

If you’ve been reading any R2 blogs for any length of time you’ll notice that most builders love silicon. It’s a very versatile and used to attach all sorts of things on your droids.

I’ve found out the hard way that not all silicon is created equal. Victor highly recommends GE Silicon II, and I have to second that. I’ve tried the generic brands and found they sometimes do not dry as well, especially if it’s a used tube, and often it will not bond well to aluminum or pull away after a while. This could be my lack of experience, but I’ve yet to have a problem when I’ve used the GE product.

I don’t think you need much silicon to hold the battery harnesses in place. I decided to add some to the top and the back side of the top swivel bracket.

And then gooped inside the lower bracket

I then moved the around until I was happy with the position and clean up the excess silicon before it had time to set.

Posted by Chris on March 29th, 2008 in Feet | 2 Comments

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Easter Get Together

I can’t believe it’s been a month since WonderCon — I’ve done very little on Artoo since, which as been a nice break, but I feel guilty that I still need to go back and post on work I’d done last month.

The good news is, as a result of us being at WonderCon there’s at least one new builder who’s jumped head first into building. What’s even better he only lives a few miles away from me – Welcome to the club Steve!

Today I did get together with Gerard to talk droid and strip my Artoo back down ready to implement my revised battery system. I was hoping to get a few more local builders over, but being easter it was hard to arrange at such short notice.

The easter bunny also brought me newer bigger batteries. I’m going to replace the smaller 7Ah batteries with a single 12V 18Ah battery. Thanks Gerard!

Now to try and get the battery to fit and still be easily removed.

I’m probably going to position the new battery just off-center with a second smaller standby battery for the RoboteQ to the right. Based on the height of the battery and the clearance needed to get it in and out, the new holder/harness will probably much shorter than my original.

I’m also even more convinced that I should loose the fuse block, which works well and even has a battery voltage read-out, but it’s somewhat overkill and gets in the way of battery removal. I could try putting it deeper into the droid, but that then defeats the purpose of keeping for the voltage display.

In closing here’s shot of my frame minus the skins

Posted by Chris on March 24th, 2008 in Electronics, Events | Comments Off on Easter Get Together

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