I got my EL wire in. Interesting stuff to mess with. Here is a quick test as it makes this tinted dome more interesting. I plan to change all the brains inside this dome. I thru this together to have some electronic details of something for the con.
Turn it on and its looks like glowing speaker wire. It looks cool when you blind them in different patterns. Maybe I'll get some more of this stuff and get the thicker versions. I love to play with this crap. I'm just a big kid with a checkbook now.
Since I ended up super gluing my last Octoports to my hands and mashed them I ended up with these new resin Octoports. They are a bit warped from shipping but no big deal that's easy to fix.
I cut a piece of scrap aluminum from a messed up footstrip to widen it. Then just used a heat gun so it bent back into shape. Then I through it in my freezer for 15 minutes. A round or two doing that process and they're ready to prime. These will be primed, painted silver and then black:)
Dome failure: My dome seized up on Friday at the Comic Con. It noticed it suddenly started turning slowly and then stopped completely. Being a rookie I thought the batteries must be dead. After recharging them it never worked properly that weekend again. So during a tear down of the dome drive system I found this after taking the wheel apart. Under the dome it was scrapping onto metal from the looks of this and that caused a pile of debris.
Before I got to this point, looking at the Pittman in this bracket there was a pile of aluminum dust around the drive shaft of the motor. That worked its way down I think and gooped up in the grease and seized the motor. I could be wrong but that's the best I can tell right now.
Maybe the stress my spring has on this motor slightly bent the center shaft.
The gears inside the Pittman show no sign of damage. I wonder if you can just buy the center drive shaft because that probably gets chewed up the most. So I cleaned this up and greased it all up and its nice and smooth spinning like its brand new. I think I brought this motor back to life. But my dome is too heavy for this type of motor and I need to look into upgrading to a new motor system in the future.
I also made a servo bracket since velcro won't work for the job I'm trying to do. This will mount onto the back of the breadpan for the Gripper side of the droid's large door. This servo has an aluminum arm so it can withstand heavier stress for these doors.
I've been working on/off on this for a few days now. You have to have the arms in just the right spot with just the right mounting system. If you don't either it won't work at all. Then if you get it to barely work you need the rods at just the right length with everything tweeked just right. Fun stuff to do, I waited a year to get to this spot and its cool as hell!
Now I have done a test fitting of my servo and screwed it to the back of the the breadpan. I cant' believe it works! Its not perfect and took a few tries at it but it opens and closes.
It didn't open and close perfectly. You have to really, really, really tweak it to do that. I did get it working by writing some stuff in the startup file. Now I have the weekend to do this to the other large door, and then write a script that links them together so they open when the scream effect happens.
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