The home stretch

We are really close to finishing the project now, the MAC mini and touchscreen are working perfectly after uncountable hours of frustration, everything is being painted today, the program displayed text perfectly, the SMS function works, RSS feeds work. We spent a ridiculous amount of time over the past two weeks on the project, so it's good that it will soon finally be over. yay.

Picstravaganza

The barrel we never used.

Cutting

Welding

Electronics work(old)

More elctronics

Cutting metal

New Electronics

Finishing the frame

Paper prototyping of safety shield

Frame Welding.

Whiteboard prototyping

Bluetooth is shit + Engineerin'

After messing around with the bluetooth arduino for two days, and thinking i had completely destroyed it It decided to work perfectly. This week we have worked on the project every day. on monday we designed a mounting bracket+ axel and took the designs to the engineer to have it machined. We also discovered that a perspex safety shield would cost 350 bucks. Get fucked. Especially because we don't even know if there is a budget organised for this class, so a refund is still a "maybe". Tuesday and wednesday were spent by me going insane all day and night trying to get the arduino to work. Today it finally did.

However the new 8x8LED code wouldnt work, even after the progmem stuff to save ram. so it is currently running the old 5x3LED code. I had to change to another serial socket program too...no idea why. Fucking bluetooth.

FRAME COMPLETE + motor

Today we spent another 5 hours welding, angle grinding and generally kicking ass. the frame is complete. it ROCKS. pictures coming soon. the motor also came, it's powerful and so much better than the other one. it fits PERFECTLY inside the top of the frame, we just need to make a mounting bracket. hell yeah.

Manufacturing day.

Spent a large part of today welding and manufacturing the 'cage'. Had bought steel the day prior from Scott's Metals, and taken it to the UQ metallurgy workshop to get cut into segments. I went back to UQ early this morning to make some additional cuts and adjustments of the first segments. Had lunch, started welding, and as it turned out, the welding rods we were using in the Arc Welder were either old or too big, so we had to go purchase some. Also it is next to impossible to see anything at all through the welding masks.

Considering neither James nor myself have ever used a welder of any kind ever before, our results were awesome. We cleaned the welds using an angle grinder. Just before 5 it began to rain, and unfortunately rain and raw steel doesnt mix well, so we called it a day. Returning to welding tommorow morning, aiming to receive the new 100w motor via express post tommorow aswell.

UQ staff shirts ROCK

So today was huge, we went to the lecture in the morning, and showed ralph our designs. we then sped home to lex's and went over the google sketchup shit i had done the previous 2 nights. we visited SCOTTS METALS, after several attempts to ring bunnings and enquire about their steel(staff are retards). we bought 2m of 76.1mm steel tube. 6m of 40x5mm flatbar and we already had 12 peices of 1m long angle bar that lex's brother had from an assignment.

we then returned back to uni, with lex wearing his UQ STAFF shirt and asked to use a metal cutting saw at the engineering place. some guy showed us how and away we went for several hours, cutting the metal to our exact specifications. occupational health and safety eat your heart out! we got a few sly looks, but then they saw UQ STAFF and smiled and kept walking.

got the RSS feed shit mostly working

Spent about 6 hours working on the flash, learning and coding and got the rss feed being read into flash, being parsed so only the first title comes out and spitting it out as a string, might need some work to make it update on the fly.