WSMI at the USSRC, 6-26-10

Ok, so it's been a couple of months since my last post, just been waiting for something awesome, and this was it! And, I must say it was awesome to take R2 out of the house and not bring him back home broken!

We'll start off with the group pics from Sat AM:





From left to right are, my R2, Chris Lee's R2, R2-KT (like you didn't know that...right?), and Dan Baker's R2.

Next up, some closeups, my droid:


and a shot of R2-KT and Dan's R2:


Some action shots of my R2:








Ok, so this one's not really accurate, but like I was really going to pass up the shot:



The driver shot:



And I'll close the pics off with these two. Cheralyn (of R2-KT's party) set these pics up early Sunday morning before I showed up to the staging area. I'll leave it up to you to decide what you think the punch line is...

Been a while...

As the title says, it's been a while since I posted anything. Plain and simple, Artoo has been out of comission since oh, maybe 2 days before ChattaCon (For those of you not here in the South, that means roughly Jan 20th...).

Whilst re-wiring Artoo to run at 24V instead of 12V, I accidentally reversed the polarity of my drive motor batteries. I know, it was a bonehead dumba$$ mistake, but you get so used to things that you stop paying as much attention as you ought to be, considering what you're working on.

Luckily I had the forethought to research all the components, and had moved my Syren10 Dome motor speed controller to the front (voice and lights) fusebox, since it doesn't run at 24V (best I can tell from their website) so the only damage was to my SaberTooth 2x25, which went 'pffft' and didn't work anymore.

Even though it took me pretty much 2 months and 3 speed controllers to get a working piece of hardware, I still can't say enough about how great the customer service and tech support is at Dimension Engineering. The first one I ordered was damaged in shipping, and the second one had issues. 'Third time is the charm' isn't it?

Anyway, today I got the replacement speed controller and Artoo is now running at 24V. Well, no smoke came out and the wheels turn in the directions they are supposed to. This being Alabama and all, I had him up on bricks so I could test drive without him knocking things over or running into furniture.

Now onto improving the home-made phono headphone jack slip ring! Next post, hopefully not 4 or 5 months down the road :)

Update #1 - electronics

I'll do this a step or two at a time, to keep it simple :)

First upgrade was to the sound system. If you recall, I was using a pair of USB powered laptop speakers running on 5v.
At DCon I quickly realized that would NOT be sufficient for any larger venue. So I hit the 'Bay and picked up a pair of speakers and an amplifier.

Here's removing the old setup:


And the new speakers:


these are directly behind the front vents, and can be seen from down low, but they are shiny, so they kind of fit...

My new amplifier:


and the re-arranged layout on the "vox" board:


and the board in place:


I think the total cost of that upgrade was about $35...the speakers and the amp were pretty inexpensive.
I'd also recommend if you get that type amp, you make sure the power lead is included. Mine was, but it was the only auction that specified the cord was included.

Next up, I decided to get away from the old 72Mhz telescoping antenna that my Futaba had.
I checked out several links from Astromech.net and decided to go with the:

Spektrum DX6i and the BR6200 from the Robot Marketplace. Once I figured out which channel to reverse, I'm running like a champ again!

That's good for now...I'll post about rebuilding the ankle later, since it's much more picture intensive.

Blog updates!

Updates are coming...be patient! Here in the next day or two I'll have some stuff to post.

The work is done, it's just the posting that takes some time...

Quick update about upgrades

Well, since getting home from DragonCon, I haven't started tearing R2 down yet, just kind of leaving him in the corner as eye candy at the moment.

I have been planning upgrades and getting started with ordering.

The first upgrades are to the sound system. At the Con, if we weren't in the room or in an elevator, you couldn't hear R2. At all. So I've ordered an amplifier, and a pair of speakers. those weren't the speaker's I'd intended to buy, the set I wanted was $5 more, but I wasn't paying enough attention and ordered these. That's just under $30, which should make him PLENTY loud enough :).

The other upgrades are waiting on JAG to get around to doing runs of the parts I want. I need steel feet - all 3, feet side details, an ALU center ankle and some ALU battery boxes, which Ethan is supposed to be looking at running sometime this month. With just those parts alone, i'm probably looking at increasing the $$ in my droid by as much as 33%...

anyway, that's all for now. Still planning my new center ankle holder, but can't actually do anything until I take him apart to get measurements.

And the bad news from DCon...

Friday morning, while moving Artoo from the Marriott to the Hyatt, I found this in the street:





Yup, that's right. A pothole. Just a small one, but devastating all the same. I was pushing Artoo across the street, and the casters in the center foot hit the pothole and stuck. Since I was pushing, Artoo stood up on the center foot, and the left side of the support for the ankle collapsed. The footshell shattered into pieces, and there's a big chunk of the oak inner foot missing.

Artoo ALMOST did a nosedive, and it was all I could do to keep him from sliding on his face down the street. People were running from all directions to help, but I managed to keep him upright.

Here's some shots of the damage to the supports:









One day this week I'll begin "tearing" Artoo back down to the frame. Naturally I'm not looking forward to that, as I'm sure you can imagine.

I'll have to get lots of measurements to build a new strong and sturdy ankle and supports out of hardwood.

I also found that Artoo does NOT like running on hotel carpet at 12v. After I check some specs on the speed controller and the dome motor, I'm going to do a rewire on the drive system to 24v.

Also, I'm going to have to pull the laptop speakers out of the frame, and get a car stereo speaker and an amplifier. Artoo was audible in the room and in the elevators, but out in the general areas of the con, he might as well have been whispering.

And of course, I'll be watching for the JAG runs of new metal feet, and possibly an alu center ankle. So, just when I thought I was done, now I've got all sorts of things to do.

DragonCon '09!

How do you choose from the 100s of pics...











That's some of the best...here's a link to the rest of the pics:

Click here!