Today is Martin Luther King Day, and our office is closed today, a double-bonus, especially after the BCP Test this past weekend, so after running some errands we hit the Build Space, determined to make some progress. Hit Back after viewing an image.
We're starting with a bare baseplate, and spent a bit of time 'hardening' the drive motors, following the information on Pete's web site. Fortunately the additional gearbox diameter from the heat-shrink didn't wind up being too much to fit in the 'bot. As you can see we've also mounted the weapon motor.
Next we want to put the pulley on the weapon shaft, so we pressed a couple of bushings into the sides, and set about positioning the pulley.
A 1/16" roll pin and a 1/4" shaft collar later, and that's the business end of the weapon taken care of. For some reason it took aaaages to get that roll pin hole drilled - but at least it's in the right place!
Time to consider the internals. This was one test layout, but we haven't figured out yet how to keep the weapon ESC and battery in place.
Here's another option ... but routing the cables from the weapon ESC might be awkward, so we'll go back to option one.
The next thing to check is the weapon motor. We're using a reversible ESC, so we needed to figure out whether it (a) had any foibles; and (b) which direction on the rudder was the right direction. The ESC does do some wacky things when you send it in one direction, but we learned the trick and will use this pic to make sure we hook up the ESC the same way when we finally come to wire it.
Here we've been installing the drive wheels. We used a setscrew to hook the axles to the motor shafts, and pinned the hubs to the axles. The tires are new 1.75" rubber tires versus the 1.5" ones in the last version.
Here we're testing the connection from the BaneBots 3-9 ESC to the motor, to make sure we're about to hook it up the right way soldering. It was a 50-50 chance, and we got it right the first time. Time to break out the soldering iron ...
Ugly, but effective. We quickly solder up both motors, and remove the on/off switch from the weapon ESC too, soldering the wires together.
We had a brainwave, and decided to make a retainer for the battery pack out of 1/32" polycarb, which we snipped to shape, drilled, and used it as a template for drilling the baseplate.
Here's the battery pack bolted down. This is just a test, so the bolts are over-sized, and we're not using locknuts, which we will when we come to do the final installation.
And we've done the same thing with the weapon speed controller, only this time using 1/8" aluminium, which should act as an additional piece of heatsink (we took the fan off the ESC). We've also installed the Whyachi power switch (albeit temporarily) and everything looks good.
The drive ESCs have been wedged into the space between the weapon ESC and drive motor.
This is where we wrapped up for tonight, with just a couple of things left to do, unfortunately one of which means waiting for an SDP/SI order, which can take ages - connecting the weapon motor to the business end, and finishing up the wiring.
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