I spent a day with Brad (Bighappydude, long time fan of my blog ;) ) acting as a catcher for getting his R2 driving for the first time! Very exciting day :)
Check out his blog update here
http://bighappyduder2.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/he-moves.html
Yeah it looks good... but mine weighs the same as one of those feet!
All went very well with the set up. Brad just plugged in his battery and he was away! After a few minutes getting used to the controls, tweaking a little bit of code (left was right, right was left) and he was confident enough to take hum outside.
After draining a couple of batteries down, we decided to transfer it to mine. The system is a very nice and easily transferable one. All we needed to do was put his arduino, Xbees and motor controllers (all mounted on one board) into mine and hook up the motors to it.
With no audio, things seemed to go great :D Unfortunately, there is audio :(
The damage was minimal, and half expected. Due to having 2 motors in each foot, turning causes more tension on the legs.
None of the frame or anything was damaged. The sound is from bond between the shoulder plate and the frame giving way. I didn't feel there was enough support there in the first place, so wasn't surprised/ But for the noise it made I thought it was going to be much worse!
In the above photo, you can see the top of the frame (on the right hand side) there the plate is no longer touching the frame. That's it! Down the sides it has pulled away too, but can't really get it in the shot.
So to fix this I have layered up 3mm strips of styrene, about 150mm long and 15mm wide and stuck them in against the shoulder plate.
When sticking them in, I did 1 layer off 3mm on the frame, then build it up, so I can guarantee each strip is touching the plate.
I also did this on the outside of the plate, there's enough from in there for a couple of strips, but had to curve the edges to fir the skins
This should now hopefully be sturdy as a rock! I'm feeling comfortable with it driving next time I get a chance where I was nervous before.
Was a great day for R2s :) Looks much better, almost ready for the 2nd run?
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