Holiday!
I’m going on holiday! Well sort of, I decided that me and my partner will be saving up to go on holiday next year which is a pretty big deal for me because I’ve never left the country before… and we’ve decided to go to Disneyland Florida. Well I’m a die hard Star Wars fan and where better to go to get my Star Wars fix right? With that being said, my droid build is going to have to take a bit of a back seat for a while however I won’t be completely stopping it, I’ll still be doing little bits and pieces I just can’t afford to save up to go to Disneyland as well as buy all the parts I need. As some of you may have heard, I’ve recently launched this website to the public which has been coded from scratch. I wanted to give a huge thank you and shout out to Clinton over at Blade Web Designs for all his help and mentoring and spotting all my silly mistakes! Make sure you go and check out his work, the guy is simply amazing!So what’s new with my droid? Well sadly not a lot has changed really because one of the things I had planned to do didn’t turn out so well. I gave it a go trying to make some feet for R2. I got the plans printed out, followed them as good as I could but I think it was the way the feet as supposed to angle inwards slightly that threw my measurements off because when I put it together everything was out of line and it was very wonky. Sadly I got really annoyed I threw it away before taking a picture of it. Something I would like to mention to anyone reading this who is going to give making their own parts a go or anyone who is new to the whole thing, you will reach those moments where things turn out great, you feel confident that you can do it causes nothing has gone wrong (or wrong enough to make things not work) but you will also get the days when things just don’t go right no matter what you do. The most important thing to remember is that, this project isn’t on any official time scale, you don’t have to have your droid build by a certain date (unless you set yourself one…) the best part for me about this project is that you can take your time with it and nobody rushes you.
2-3-2 Thoughts
For the past couple off days I have been fighting a cold, so I’ve not done much, after the little mishap with the feet I tried to build I kind of put myself off building parts for a bit but then I told myself that I was bored with not doing
anything and had an idea, if I couldn’t make the actual feet, make it easier for myself, do what I did with the legs, make temporary ones… Don’t have to be perfect just as long as they do the job until I can buy some and I can tinker about
with other things whilst I save up. So I did. They’re only half done, well technically I’d say a quarter done, since the angles were throwing me off I decided to give R2 some hideous square block feet for a while. They have the same dimensions
as the proper ones, sort of, except they aren’t angled, so they look a lot bigger. It kind of looks like you’ve put a baby in the BFG’s Doc Martins. It’s all screwed together however some bits are (long) than others cause I didn’t bother to stand
it down as I wanted to make sure they worked before I spent time sanding and cutting. That will probably be tomorrows job. I rough cut a hole in the top of the foot for the leg to go in but I need to make the whole a bit bigger so the leg can
move when he goes into 3 legged position.
I am also currently designing a way for him to keep 3 legs for the time being but move into 2 legged modes to save space and so far I’ve come up with the idea of making a third leg and fixing it to a plate. At the bottom of my frame, there is a
large hole cut out for a retractable third leg which is pretty cool to have, whilst I work on the 2-3-2 configuration at a later date, I’m gone to put a plate over the hole inside the frame that the leg will be connected to with 4 bolts. I’m then
going to have 4 more bolts on the plate that have springs on them which then fix to another plate further up (we’ll call that the base plate) and the base plate will be attached to the body…somehow… In theory, when R2 stands into the 2 legged
position, the first plate will be pushed up, compressing the springs a bit and the baseplate will hold its position thus allow the third leg to push up the plate. It will only be a small distance I think that it pushes up but if the third leg
was completely fixed, I would have to manually remove it to stand him up on 2 legs. This way I can put him in a 2 legged position, without removing the center leg.
Also I have been pondering the idea of using a Gyroscope in my droid, I figured long story short, if he’s in two legged mode and somebody bumps him, he’s on a slanted surface or outside on a windy day he may fall over and the word “accident” with
this sort of project doesn’t mean cheap! Well it usually doesn’t anyway aha. The Gyroscope idea would give R2 a position to be in when he is stood up in 2 legs and should he begin to lean forwards or backwards the gyroscope circuit will trigger
my shoulder linear actuators and feet motors, and they will move to compensate for the lean thus bringing him upright.
Logic Chat
Nothing really new on the build side of things sadly as I'm seriously lacking the funds to do anything until payday. One week today! The things I have been doing are mostly website related. I've broken the ice with the Interactive Droid Builder
so that is coming along nicely, very complicated but it's moving along.
I'm in two minds whether when I get paid, to spend £20 or so on some resin utility arms or spend it on parts for my Dome Lighting. I should be finishing my Dome Lighting List ready to be embedded into my website very soon which will give a run
down of all the parts you need for the Dome Lighting System (Teeces) and links to buy them from. I would suggest however, take the name of the part and do google it first just to see if you can find them at a cheaper price! But other than
that nothing much has really happened, I've been trying to finish my Web Design and Development Course most of this month which I did complete just FYI and I'm waiting for it to all be validated and signed off.
I have decided to move away from social media as a form of keeping logs of my build and I'm going back to creating YouTube videos. Check out my first one here talking about the Teecess System!