Oh crazy weather! Last night we were building in a T-shirt in 75 steamy degrees. Tonight, it's 25°F and even with four layers of clothing it's pretty darn chilly. Still - we're on a mission to finish the antweight, so time to get going! Click Back after viewing an image.
One of the things we noticed last night was that we'd picked up some grit in the gearbox of one of the Pololu drive motors. Given how dusty and mucky an arena typically is, we're going to install some paper sleeves over the gearboxes to keep the crud out. In the meanwhile, in lieu of a can of compressed air to blow the grit out, we went the other way and sucked it out. Expensive, yes, but Dyson vacuums are awesome.
Although it's 25°F we decided to apply some team colours to the shell of Poor Punctuation 0.9 while it was sitting apart from the 'bot.
Coming up on the last of the wiring! The power leads to the weapon ESC aren't long enough to make it to where we're connecting everything together so we need to solder on some extensions.
Here we're starting to hook all the power leads up. We've twisted together all the positives and we're about to solder them together.
And finally: the negatives are being soldered together. One more thing to do after this - plug the battery in! :-)
Yeah - not so much. When we powered up the 'bot the first thing we noticed was that only one of the drive speed controllers had blinking LEDs on it. After binding the receiver we verified that only one side of the drive was functioning. Anoying, as we could have sworn we tested it before beginning the build.
Of course, it's possible that we have a poor soldering job in there, but to see we grabbed our other SozBots ESC pair and hooked them up to test. Although you can't see it here, both LEDs on this pair lit up, so we must have grabbed the wrong set to put in this 'bot.
The other problem we're having is that the weapon motor doesn't spin. Both the motor and ESC are new, although from Hobby King, so maybe one or both are bad. There are no musical tones when power is applied, although the receiver is receiving power from the ESC, so the ESC must be receiving power, and the motor does twitch when we push the stick up, so there's connectivity. At this point we're numb from cold, so we're going to go inside and warm up, and tackle these issues tomorrow evening.
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