It's been quite a while since I last posted. Sadly, that doesn't mean a lot has gotten done. A few days after my last post I had an interview for my first "Real" job as I had just graduated in early May. After getting the job and starting it, my progress on R2 entirely died. Eventually I got into the new routine and have been able to work on a few things very slowly. This post should get my progress mostly caught up.
First things first. In my last post I mentioned that I had a really large gap at the top of my dome. Turns out I was just afraid of breaking the styrene and wasn't really trying hard enough. Once I finally pulled it out of the box I was able to get it down to this.
On the lower half I have a nice snug fit. Happy with it.
The bottom part of the upper half has a good snug fit as well.
This picture is upside down I guess. At the bottom of the image is the top of the pie panel. You can see a small gap here, but nothing like was in my last post. This seemed much more manageable. Or at least I thought so, more on that later.
This here is where the big issue is. Clearly I have a rather large gap on what I've been calling the 'spines' of the pie panels. Everyone of them has a gap about this size and it bothers me quite a lot. After showing this images around I decided to go ahead and cut the dome and see if that would help.
The problem I thought I might run into (which I did) was that if I had a snug fit at the bottom of the pie panels, how does cutting below that point help at all? If it's already snug there it can't really move up any more than it already is can it? It was mentioned that I might not be able to move it vertically, but twisting it around and trying different angles might do the trick. That gave me hope, as it's true, you might be able to find a good fit by doing that. In my case, however, that wasn't the case. I still haven't gotten this nailed down, but the plan is to try and cut out the pie panel openings on the inner-upper dome and then try to hold the thinner, more flexible spine in place while the weldon does it's job. Once I have a nice day out that I don't mind working with the dremel outside I'll attempt this.
I also picked up the MDF floral ring from Michaels and because I was feeling impatient and didn't have the tools around to cut the 2mm off of it that I needed to, I used a saw on the leatherman I had laying around. It took quite some time to get all the way around the ring with this tiny hand saw, but it worked out just fine in the end. Here's a bulk of images showing all of the dome stuff.
Something I had seen in another builder's log was that the supplied base ring didn't exactly line up properly with the ends of the dome. Meaning it sticks out a little below the dome and it isn't flush going down. He never got an answer on how to compensate for that, so I thought I'd ask again here. (I think he might have switched to an aluminum dome since then) Here's pictures showing what I'm talking about. First image is flush, second shows the base ring sticking out a bit.
Over this time I picked up some resin parts from Wayne Orr. Here's what I got.
Got the radar eye, logic surrounds, and 3 (only one pictured) holo projectors. They all look great, but still need some clean up. In the last image here you can see that the back plate and the hole it goes into have some extra resin on them. I'm not entirely sure how to clean this up with out damaging the threads on these pieces. Speaking of the threads, can anyone explain how they work exactly? They don't look like they are actually spiral threads as much as just rings to hold it in place. Is it just pop in and out and friction handling these?
I also got a handful of these little guys which are basically power splitters. They take an input and have 4 outputs. Should come in handy eventually.
My newest part just came in this week and while I initially intended for it to just sit in pieces in the box until I was ready for it, I felt the need to put it together last night and here it is.
In the near future I have a wooden frame arriving. I sent the funds for it at the end of last week and hope to see it before Christmas. Once it gets here I should be ordering my rockler bearing before too long too and I'll mount this nice R2ATL dome drive. It's likely to be one of the only aluminum parts that I use, but I just couldn't pass up this run knowing that my frame would be here so soon. I was surprised to see how small the motor was on this thing. Every image I've seen of these things has been a close up shot like the ones above and they make it seem like a rather large piece, but it is pretty small. I was always thinking these wheels took up far more room in the dome opening than they do =D
A few things not pictured here are a few PCB boards I have ready to assemble. I received a Data logic port board a long long time ago now and assembled it a couple of weeks ago. My Uno died on me so I haven't had a change to test it yet. The guy I bought it from has them made and sells them on eBay. They're knock offs, but all of the pro mini's I've bought from him (10-12) have all worked just fine, so I'm torn on whether to order another from him again. For $13 it's pretty cheap. I also have the CBI to go along with this board, and I believe I have the left over components from other projects to put it together, but I thought I'd wait on another Uno first.
I also got 3 of CuriousMarcs holo boards, and 2 of the marcduino boards. I have none of the components for these yet, but plan to order them soon.
Really I have plenty to work on, and will have more once the frame gets here. I keep telling myself I don't know what to work on though. One of these nights I'll work out a game plan though =D
