Home on Robot Daycare

The espresso machine has floated back up to near the top of projects I feel like messing around with.

I finished applying all the layers of paint, sparkles, and clearcoat to the Zipp 2001 frame a couple months ago, and finally worked up the motivation to sand and polish the clearcoat.

I got a Wacom MovinkPad 11 drawing tablet a few months ago as a portable replacement for my ancient Wacom Bamboo USB drawing tablet.

I replaced the little 5-axis mill with a router recently, and needed a low-profile vise system for holding large workpieces.

Adhesive bonds.

This is the beginning of a series of posts about robot actuation.

I needed to convert a DT Swiss hub from using a 15mm thru-axle down to a 12mm thru axle to fit on my commuter bike.

The original saddle clamps on the Zipp 2001’s were not very well designed, and the clamp that came with my frame (like many) was broken.

I think the Zipp 2001 is one of the coolest bicycles ever made.

      3D printed expanding fixture for op 2   

 Split rear axle means 2 rear brakes Laser cut stainless steel bracket from Send Cut Send Using the lathe as a drill press to countersink the holesRe-using the old brake rotor Time for some plumbing

It has been an eventful year.

This isn't one of my usual project blog posts, but I owe my dear readers some context for the lack of project content.

All bonded together A torsion-less bar, if you will

A fun afternoon design project: Grip geometry still  needs some fine-tuning

 As I've mentioned in previous posts, robot land has an annual car-and-other-vehicle show.

 Finally retrieved it from MITERS, where it's been hanging from the ceiling for the last six years or so Prius inverter based motor drive will be the next thing to be redone after it drives again:

Why haven't I been building anything?

  Slapped a mini cheetah motor drive on there to make it go

 Missing a rotorMachining a new shaft for the rotor: Improvised chip deflector for roughing nice Other side done bearing and lock ring test fit Next to the stock shaft.

  Single-point keyway broaching

 Dane tricked me into building something dumb ice skate in a garbage pile at mitersbridgeporting out a skate holder

 Stators shrink-fit into the housings: Machining fixture turned into a guide fixture for the shrink-fit operation Band heater wrapped around the housing to keep it hot while installing the stator: Borrowed the pneumatic powered hydraulic press at work

Motor bracket laser cut and bent from .188" steel by SendCutSend: Crufted NEMA-56-size Clearpath servo motor - integrated motor drive, plugs straight into single or 3-phase mains. 1:1 belt to the spindle:   Pile of junk being replaced:

 

Printed plastic expanding mandrel to hold the part from the inside: Around .005" TIR on the as-printed surface after clamping from the ID.

 

After brining it to the BD car show in 2022 and remembering what a blast it was to drive, I got interested in working on the Big Kart again.

Picked up from a technician at work who'd pressed many a bearing:  Put a magnet in the back side of the press tool so it sticks to the bottom of the arbor press ram Tool sticks to the ram and automatically squares itself!

3d printed dovetails - the AXA sized holders are just big enough to fit two screws into a 20x40mm aluminm t-slot extrusion:  

 More little drone motors, flywheels, and motor drive mounting brackets: New MJF printed structure to hold everything: This is almost everything, shooting for 1kg total when it's done, not much left for the protective shells, foot, and control PCB.

Robot land has an annual car-and-other-vehicles show.

There will be a proper blog post  

It balances!

Running off a bench supply and offboard micro, controlling with a joystick.

Another CPW, another round of tesla coiling.

Still needs a motor, of course, but it's taking shape Someone asked what the step on the inside of the reaction wheel was for:

 

I installed a DRO on the Clausing.

Not long after my masters thesis went online, clones of the mini cheetah actuators started showing up on AliExpress/Alibaba.

 One of the Chinese mini cheetah clone manufacturers was nice enough to send me one.

Once again Mike's tesla coil worked flawlessly - at least until someone tripped over the extension cord powering a fan cooling the primary capacitor bank.

Here's the detailed post to go with the pictures and videos I've been dribbling out over the last few months.