Peter's stuff.
Everything I’ve described makes the bot fragile. Between two dogs and a cat, that’s not gonna work. I’ll definitely, probably, finish the modelling and design anyway as an educational experience. Building it would be wicked to.
But it may never go into production.
Northern Brewer has a deal on gear, and the GigaWort is in stock. So it’s time to make that choice. Do I buy or build? Obviously, buying would get me brewing faster. But would it be brewing like I want to. If I had a desire to drink 5 gallons of beer at a time, I should go for it. Or three gallons of the same all grain beer. Either way, it sounds dull. I want to get super microbrewing. That’s my rationale for having a dozen or so growlers. So. I think I’m just going to get converting. Soon. Ish.
The problem has always been the height of the stair versus the depth. That and for some darned reason I was fixated on the chin-up analogy. I could just have the get at the end of legs. Have the legs be two offset joints. By the way, gentle reader, I know not the words I abuse. The front legs are easy, as the would start at the front shoulder, extend to, almost, the back shoulder, and back to the front again. The back legs though would drag since they go from back to front to back. Except. This being why I bother writing this, except…
The rear leg’s shoulder would be mounted on a standard DC motor, continuous rotation servo, or stepper. Rather than folding down, which would rack the knee on the stair when ascending, it would spin over the top, gotta remember to take into account the potential change of position on this, thereby giving the rear leg a chicken walk, though that’s a lie. About chickens that is. They just have super long feet against tiny hips.
This was an earlier brain child, that just reached maturity. It might require too high of voltage out current, but it would be a cheaper build, maybe. Less precision, definitely. Oh, and it would look sick. Do a looped one sided flexible chain. Each link would have matching electromagnets. As the links move down, creating the lift if you will, the motors and wheels being at the bottom of the chain, the links would run against a brushes that wild activate from that new link on down. Add in a couple diodes, and as the links were retracted, the magnets would disengage.
Like I said, I need to do math on how much current/voltage I’m talking about. EMF might be an issue. Pace makers. Small metal bits. Whatever.
What about a zipper. Yet again, make the chain only roll one way, but instead of magnets, have two chains, with opposite facings, zippering together.
I’d love to just go inspector gadget, but that seems the most complicated, mainly due to the number of concentric rings I’d need. That and how to actuate them is kinda slippy.
Yay! It also happened just in time for the Hackaday prize, so I might flesh it out and post there. Might is always a very operative word. One of the things that makes this much more mighty than musty is that I’ve already got on a couple issues, one that reduces the viability for the specific application, one that affects all applications, and one that affects all applications, but the specific.
But other than that, I think it’s a wicked idea. I should at least do up some drawings. It’s also be a great one to be an overly complex project to use as training for how to do multiple moving parts in Fusion 360, to get free up with my own lack of knowledge and overall act as a counter intuitive example of far-of-failure.
By the power of metal skull, the failure is mine!
Of the cuff, it’s potentially a new slogan concept. I don’t like the metal thang. Also, I’m not sure if that’s still too on the nose for comfort. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to get worked over by some silly trademark case. Oh well, it was a fun one liner while it lasted. Now it’s a fun one strike-througher
How to do variable height leg/wheel combos that can raise something with a quarter inch of clearance high enough to climb stairs while still being able to sweep the entire middle floor (including under the couch). Cams would be easy if it didn’t need…
Wait. A multiple step cam system. The wheels and motors are mounted on rods with pinion gears. These rods go through a geared motor thing that turns the entire assembly, which gives us the clearance for the motor. Than any normal geared motor just raises the whole leg by spinning the motor which messages with the pinion. I’m fairly sure my English is crap right now. Hopefully this will jog enough memory for me to be able to draw it tomorrow.
More of the slight head cold. But when it happens to really hot on Friday night and rocks through the weekend, it kinda looks motivation. To clarify, I’m doing the third load of laundry and currently debating about round of dishes, so it’s not like I’m completely dead to the world. However, for whatever reason, Fusion 360 is really doesn’t about creating or moving projects around, and I don’t want to dick with it, but I should, but I don’t want to.
I should.
I think I’m going to rough in my design choices for my sweeper bot. I’ll add guesses for numbers, but otherwise, I’ll try to leave everything vaguely derived. The body should be squarish, with the wheels mounting halfway to the body. The wheels should extend above and below the body in case of cat/dog induced inversion.
Well that does it for the old brain tonight. May my cold go to hell.
I think I need to start doing proper documentation on what I do at work. Ideally I’d want something available on both the web and print (because I’m a dinosaur). Print is easy, because I literally work on a print shop. Well it’s doable, but I need to look at what we have available without pissing on too many breakfast cereal bowls.
I guess I could bang something out in PReS Connect?
I made some good progress.
I ran through a transactional mailing with variable length records, white space records and the like. I’ve now realized there’s a serious need for sample data generators. Or, at least I think there’s a need for sample data generators. I might write something up. Or I might not. Maybe I’m worrying about things that don’t exist. Either way, I have a lot of work to do, and the more I do it, the better.
Next, I printed my homebrew test thing. I’ll post pictures at some point. It came out at nice, but the measurements weren’t 100% on. Of course, this is why I designed a test piece. I’ll need to as tensioners for the X and Y axes. Huh, axes is the plural form of axis. Weird. I printed someone else’s Y tensioner, but I don’t really like it. I’ll make my own. As it is, I didn’t see an X axis tensioner right off, and that’s the one that’s the most crap right now. The other issue I have is the texture on the bottom and top of points is similar to a scaled down picked truck diamond finish. I’m thinking that’s under extrusion. As it is, I have the Wif the test block, and she loved it.
Also on the printing front is the printing front end. I kinda want to move over to slicr rather than cura for my slicer of daily use. Because why not.
Over the next few days, I need to do a clean off the den, so I can get back to brewing, sewing, and stuff.
Smashing worked. It’s stupid, but it’s a surprisingly robust solution to all of printing’s troubles. By snagging I mean “take a PDF, add a page, delete the page I just added, save”. It’s almost embarrassing.