R5-D4 Finished!

Yesterday I finished R5-D4 at Tom's house. Basic construction of this droid is done and he's ready to go out and interact with people.

There are a few tweaks on parts or gaps here and there. Then later I have loads of work getting the servos for the doors and pie panels to work.

Scott, the maker of JEDI control helped Tom and I tweek some issue with the droid driving in a circle. It turned out the 'center' of the VEX wasn't sending out the code the JEDI expected. So the fix to get the droid to sit still was to just update the startup.txt with the center the VEX was reading out 1520 was adjusted to 1480 that VEX was reading off the transmitter feedback. That fixed it!

Every now and then I notice the droid 'jumps' forward or backward about 5 inches. Or some random sound is triggered. Sometimes my custom jukebox starts playing like the droid is possessed and alive and acts by itself. One time I cussed it out and the R5 responded back with some chirp. I don't know how that bug happened but it was freaking funny. My theory is lose of signal from the VEX? Because I don't always have my antenna sticking out very far when doing tests. When it does that it seems more like the droid is 'alive'. Its cool and kinda of scary if a 200 pound droid starts deciding where and when it drives around.

One day I hope to 2-3-2 this droid, but until then lots of fun ahead.

I also did some work on R2-Q5. Now my next goal is to finish the black dome on R2-Q5. The dome on him now is my tinted dome. I don't think I'm going to do much with this dome until 2012.

I recently fixed some of the skin gaps, counter sunk some holes on the skin and then repainted the skins. I also painted my aluminum utility arms copper. Some where in there is my frankstein leg I fixed that was cracked. I think it weights around 50-60 pounds without batteries. This droid won't have any servos. Just drive around, make some sounds,  dome rotation with lights.

This is the back of R2-Q5. No back door at all. Its a pain in the ass to relive again. Its nice to have a back door when you really need one and its all over with. No fun for me anyway doing that section of droid building.

 The odd couple. Sometime this year I need to do some serious work on my R2-D2 dome. I'm waiting for a few part runs so I have some HPs and a radar eye to begin working on the dome.

This is pretty much what I'll be bringing to the 2011 Phoenix Comicon. Next year both droids will be drive and R5 should have many servos in it by then.

Also I want to thank David for swapping out frequencies with me on the VEX transmitter. I'm on a 65 now instead of 89 in the R5-D4 droid. What that means is my droid is not on the default channel that you get from VEX transmitters on ebay