Christmas mutterings part 2

Well, the new battery seems to work much better but there are still unexplained things affecting the droid's performance.

This morning I moved my truck to the other side of the driveway to test the droid on a "clean" patch of driveway. The other side was all scuffed up from the tires. I wanted to see if and what was scuffing the driveway. In the test this morning, there are now a zillion tire marks (some up to 18" long) on the driveway. This means one of the tires (I think the right one) is dragging under certain conditions. I have no clue what that could be. Possibly motors not mounted exactly parallel? Or maybe a bad motor? Or a speed controller/transmitter that's not calibrated correctly? Or ?????? If anyone has any clues, please let me know. I'm pretty much baffled as I sit here. I thought the old scuff marks were from the old front center caster dragging. Not so.

It's never ending droid madness around here. The to-do's multiply exponentially. I will be glad to finally finish this project. After that absolutely no more robot building for me. I'll improve the bots I have but R2 is the last of the line.

Christmas mutterings

Well, it's Christmas morning and I'm thinking about sneaking out to the garage before the wife wakes up so I can experiment with a new Optima blue top battery I bought yesterday. After rewiring the motors with new 12 gauge wire and rewiring most of my electrical connections, the droid still was very sluggish. Especially climbing the driveway. So after trying everything I possibly could think of I went out and bought a new battery which I had on a charger for 8 hours yesterday.

Oh and another wonderful revelation. My motor mounts and foot shells need much more work. Actually It's going to be back to the drawing board once again. Very frustrating but it's just part of the process. And as I read other posts from other R2 builders, everyone does it over and over and over until they get it right. The test is if you still have your mind intact after it's finally done.

So the next plan is to shift the motors forward again (in the original position) and then cut the motormounts thinner so there is more room to pivot the shells. I may need to fabricate some new brackets for the shells though.

There's a new unexplained weirdness on the droid. I have a main power switch and also a power switch to the speed controller. That way I could leave the droid standing all lit up with the drive disabled. For some reason the other day after a test I touched the switch and it felt hot. It was an old 1950's switch I had so maybe it was bad. Since it wasn't critical, I removed the switch and wired the speed controller direct. But it still has me wondering .....

Merry Christmas everyone !

Droid podiatrist

As much as I have been working on my droids feet ankles and drive motors, I feel like a droid podiatrist. Adjusting the foot shells and angle of my motor is very time intensive and requires a lot of creative thinking. After about 27,582 adjustments, I think that the feet and drive units are adjusted pretty good. The rear shells are not completely level but there seems to be enough clearance. The front of the two rear shells dips a little lower than the rear of the shell.

Last night I got a different 4" caster ... one much lighter but still very durable with quality bearings. The other caster was about 5-10 pounds heavier. You could have rolled a tank on that caster. So between that and the resin ankle I replaced, I'm guessing the droid is 30-40 pounds lighter which is significant. The 4" caster just barely fits in my oversized (Daniel) foot shell and just barely touches one side when turning around. Not bad. The other caster rubbed terribly.

I also added quick release hinges to my electronic drop down door so I can move the electronics to the bench easily. I got the idea for these hinges (and the McMaster part#) from Jerry Greene aka JAG. The wires to the dome, sound system and motors were trimmed to just the right size. Today I may change out the drive motor wires to a thicker gauge.

After the holidays I'll be installing a set of PVC battery boxes on the droid and then I can focus on some other projects to get ready for MegaCon. My next project is to build a portable droid garage that R2 can drive into and get loaded into my truck with a winch. The droid garage will be enclosed and on wheels. At an event, I can wheel R2 to the site, open the front door/ramp and drive him out. It will solve several problems if it works.

Smash

Well another lesson learned today. I fired up the droid to show Mom and Dad. Well, I wasn't paying attention and spun him around (in a tight space) and smashed the front of him into an open lower drawer of my workbench. AHHHHHHH One coin return was crushed but looks like it is repairable. A good lesson to stay focused on driving and less on yakking.

And so the "weathering" begins .....

More problems need addressing

It was nice putting R2 back together with all the fancy details added. It took me all day and by evening the droid was operational once again. B U T ..... it's not complete as there's still quite a few things that need to be done because of several major problems I uncovered.

1. There's a problem with my power. Either the battery is bad, the charger isn't charging or ???. When I drive my droid up the driveway it really struggles with power. I know there's just not enough juice because the sound system also sounds crackly when R2 gets "tired". This is a major problem that needs to be addressed.

2. The center wheel is off center big time. It even rubs on the foot shell in tight turns and backing up. Not good. I suspected this would be a problem and it is. So I'm going to order a more appropriate caster and redo the center foot caster mount. Not that big of a problem but time consuming.

3. One of my rear outer feet are not level. That's right. The foot shell with it's beautiful mount and all is tilted a little forward which just sucks. I don't have a clue how I'm going to fix that problem. May need to drill a new motor mount set of holes. That's pretty radical so I need to sleep on this one.

But the good news is my little R2 looks beautiful with his new paint job and shiny details.

------------ Picture of R2 and some of the front foot assembly --------------

Lots of building very little blogging

For some reason I just haven't put in the blog time to match the building. R2 is now getting very close to completion. I've been spending a few hours a day and most of the weekends. This last week I finally came up with a nice solution to hanging the outer R2 feet from my custom motor mounts. They're now solid and easily removable.

Today was a beautiful day and perfect for painting. So R2 was completely taken apart and painted. I first washed down the parts with acetone and then primed the aluminum ones with self etching aluminum/metal primer. Then Lowes Velspar satin white paint was applied. The legs, horseshoes, feet, ankles, and a few miscellaneous parts now look correct and I went through quite a few cans of paint. I'll wait until tomorrow to put it all back together again (If I can remember how). And then R2 will be complete other than the battery boxes and ankle cyclinders. The battery boxes I made are just not cutting it. Not sure what I'm going to do but these just don't look right. After putting all this work and money into R2 I'm not going to compromise on quality.

So .... tomorrow R2 may be unofficially complete. It's hard to comprehend after years of working on this project.

New front ankle

My old system with the resin filled fiberglass ankle worked pretty good but darned ... it was very heavy. I bought a JAG aluminum ankle and shaved 20 pounds (at least) off my R2. I wasn't sure how I was going to adapt what I had in the caster to foot to ankle assembly. However it went smooth and the new design is even stronger than the old. I ran a few bolts into the ankle from the angle iron inside the foot. And .... I made a new set of exterior ankle anti-pivot "triangles" to limit the stress on the ankle when it encounters resistance. It's very strong now. After redoing and re-installing it on the frame I was overjoyed that it turned out to be perfectly level which is critical in a single caster front foot.

I completely stripped R2 down to the frame this weekend and am fine tuning a lot of the assemblies. Today I will work on the drive train and hopefully refine that assembly. It works but the foot shells are a little sloppy. I'll probably have to cut some more fiberglass from the top of them to move the motors over about 1/4 - 1/2".

We were down visiting our older son for the last week during Thanksgiving so the building has been minimal. But now it's time to kick it into high gear and get these robots ready for MegaCon.