Unfortunately we're at the end of our Christmas holiday, and still suffering from a horrendous cold, but we wanted to see whether we could get the New Year off to a productive start none-the-less. We elected to see whether we could get our hobbyweight drumbot to a driveable state. Hit Back after viewing an image.
Our starting point for today is this 10lb 8.4oz pile of parts. This pile doesn't include a rear wall, power switch, drive ESCs, or fasteners, but we think we ought to be able to accomodate those in the remaining one and a half-ish pounds.
Today's main goal is to get the 'bot driveable. We started by trimming down the motor walls, as they were about a quarter-inch too high, and trimming off the excess bolts, etc. Next we moved to the drive shafts.
There may have been a more elegant way of doing this, but we didn't want to take the whole motor apart, so we broke out the Dremel-a-like and went through a few cutting discs trimming the axles.
After pinning the axle extensions, we drilled a capture hole for the bolt that holds the wheel on the axle and installed the wheel, before remounting the whole assembly back into the 'bot.
What this picture fails to capture is the frustrating half-hour we spent trying to get this assembled. The weapon motor is effectively permanently installed to it's mounting plate, the #6-32 screws that mount the weapon motor plate to the cross-piece interfere with the drive motor wall, and the 1/4-20 bolts that mount the drive motor wall are somewhat inaccessible behind the weapon motor! But we perservered, and eventually everything came together.
After putting the frame back together we spent some time checking for binding in the drive. This is a long-standing issue with most of our 'bots - friction in the drivetrain - because we don't quite get things perfectly true after drilling, tapping, etc., but eventually we found the magic combination of bolt tightening that kept things moving.
So time for a bench test of the drive motors. With a battery to the ESC, and one feeding the receiver via BEC we were able to verify both HandiWorks motors ran okay, without binding on the frame - hooray! Although this is a wheels-up test of course: things may be different with the wheels on the deck - we'll see later!
Quite a bit later, apparently, as we're out of ring terminals so we can't hook up the drive ESCs, and it's about time for dinner. We did install the weapon ESC and verified it was operational and spun the motor in the right direction. The ESC is not reversible - we do have one that is, but it doesn't fit neatly in the 'bot, so we'll save that for version three!
Subscribe
