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.

large POV array + coding

Last night lex made the final led array with 8 BIG 10mm leds mounted on breadboard, it's awesome. today im going to spend about 4 hours programming, hopefully i'll get the code updated to work with 8 leds!

presentation + search

Today we did our presentation. Probably spent about 2 hours making the presentation and lex spent many hours making the cad diagrams. After we presented i stayed and did the group reports while lex went off in search of materials, he visited bunnings, turbon(a metal working place) and made enquireies about plastics. He aquired steel bars which will be used for the frame. We also negotiatied the use of an Arc welder from gabe's dad. fuck yeah!

FLASH BREAKTHROUGH + update from yesterday

So we never ended up going to bunnings etc cause it was raining and ...well...i didn't feel like leaving the house. so i spent all day curled up attempting to learn actionscript 3 + learning about serial-socket proxies + going insane when nothing worked.

We decided yesterday to do a flash interface on a touch screen with a little keyboard, which users can select a rss feed, or enter a string and hit upload to send it to the arduino.


that was easy, just whipped up a bg in illustrator and then popped in some components in flash.


coding was less easy.


So by 6pm i had a semi-working-but-not-working-at-all prototype. which SHOULD of worked, but didn't for some reason. So i spent today working on it more(while spore downloads, FUCK YES) and it's currently 1:10 and i have the following:


When the user hits upload, a hardcoded string of "aaabbb" is sent via a socket, routed via an external program(only way to do it) to com port 4 where the arduino takes the string and displays is as per its code.


Now i'm about to change the hardcoded string to user input from a text box. wish me luck

More coding + bunnings trip

Today I'm looking at flash coding to take rss feeds and send over a sockt/serial port.
It's slow going, but i'm learning.

Thisarvo we plan to visit bunnings and pick up some more supplies, as well as contact suppliers of plastics and aluminum fabricators. I think we are going to use a large water drum as the base for the stand, when filled it weighs like 50 kilos, so it is SOLIIIIDD. probably going to bolt steel to that to make the tower part.

Marathon coding nightmare + test bearing solder

Today we spent 10 hours at uni, 9 of which were spent fumbling with the clumsey arduino coding system trying to make an automated version of the simple POV program. at first this sounds easy. Instead of having the letters hard-coded into the program and re-uploaded each time, just make it display whatever is sent over the serial port. easy right?

WRONG!!

Shit was SO difficult, partly because of the way the original code worked, but mostly because arduino is so lame when it came to working with arrays and kept throwing up funky errors for basic things which any other language could do easily. This, coupled with our generaly noobyness in regards to coding led to a nightmare. After about 10 failed attempted on my behalf we attracted the attention of Dekker. When your problem stumps dekker, you KNOW it's a problem, that guy is a genius!

So we became his little project, we could see it eating away at him as he helped us. but eventually, at 6pm at night, we achieved success!!!!!

we now have arduino code which takes letters and spaces from the serial port, places them into an array, then displays them on a loop. you can send $ to clear the array for now data, or else you can append the current data by simply typing more. such a perfect solution!

We also did a test solder of wires to the bearings to ensure it was possible; it was. We then hooked the wires up to power and a multimeter to ensure they transferred power. They did, but when they spin it was not a stead current. We discussed this issue and many more in our group meeting from 6 till 7 and decided on a potential solution. Run the power into a rechargeable battery, then into the arduino, so if the flow is not consistent it wont matter. There is a probably a specific piece of hardware to do this which we will look into.

We also heavily discussed the mounting situation and the shielding situation and decided on a probable solution. Overall a very productive day.

Arrival of the bearings

The bearings arrived in the post today, they are almost exactly what i imagined! these ones should be perfect, they don't spin freely, but they are lubricated internally so they should be okay spinning at speed.

Tomorrow we will bring in all of our parts so far for our group meeting and discuss final build options!

Aluminum: Optimum Build Material

James purchased several lengths and styles of aluminum, including tubing, flat bar and half moon.
The expected weight of the aluminum (based off density calculations) was lighter, the tubing proving itself as an optimal choice. It has the capability and availability to route the necessary wiring through the arm itself, while producing less drag.

Next step is to fabricate the bearing housing, arm rotor base plate and motor assembly.
It should be noted that aluminum will be used for all abovementioned parts, as it is light, and in the case of the motor assembly, is a good heat conductor.

The heat that the motor generates is significant enough to require a cooling fan for extended usage. The reason for this is that it was initially designed as a remote control helicopter motor, where the blades of the helicopter would actively cool the motor itself. An aluminum housing will allow contact between the motor and the housing, dispersing the heat of the motor into the housing, allowing it to cool more effectively. I also plan to use a thermal grease to further lubricate the process.

BEARINGS!

Just spend a few hours researching BEARINGS. We will be using bearings to transfer power from a stationary position(the motor side) to a moving position(rotor side).

Bearings consist of metal ball bearings contained in a metal cage, the inner diameter rotates independently of the outer, allowing one side to remain fixed. Turns out there is a crapload of terminology and variance amongst bearings, so there was more research than expected that I had to do. Anyways, i ordered 6 608-ZZ-ECO bearings. Fingers crossed the research paid off.

Motor Experiements, and Short lecturer meeting.

Today we took all of the motor components in to uni and fooled around with them. After SIX hours we had an automated motor mechanism which started pulse width modulation at 800 and automatically increased over time to full speed; 1800. This was all done through an arduino. HELL YEAHS. Thanks to dekker for helping with the coding, I would never of thought to use the inbuilt MILIS function, which records the time in milliseconds since the current section of code began, as a timer to ramp up the speed over time.

The main problem here was our limited coding knowlege, it took a LONG time to wrap our heaps around the code which we downloaded, and than had to radically adapt to our needs. But we did it! personal victory woo woo!

Lex had spent like 6 hours the night before trying to get it to work with no avail, but that time he spent helped us today, as he had done a huge amount of initial research.




We also had a short meeting with Ralph about OHS and he said he "sent out some tendrils to probe" hopefully we dont get screwed over by OHS. SPINNING BLADES OF DEATH for the WIN!

DX order Arrives

Today the DX order arrived. Fuck yeah, parts!!

POV examples

DEAL EXTREME order shipped, lex goes shopping.

Today the deal extreme order was shipped, eta 3-6 working days.

After uni lex went shopping and got some RGB LEDS and spent all night making a mini working handheld POV machine with an arduino. Awesome.

Project Description (S.M.A.R.T Goal)

Our project hopes to produce a LED Persistence Of Vision (POV) machine which displays an RSS feed from the internet dynamically. This machine involves a large rotating arm with an LED array, which spins due to a brushless DC motor powered by an Arduino. Another Arduino receives information wirelessly from a pc and blinks the LEDS in a certain order so, when spun at high speed, words are spelt in the air. Involved in the project are James Richards and Alex Hyde. The Project, when finished will be exhibited on a moveable stand, so it can be deployed in any location. The project will be completed by Wednesday, October 22, 2008 and will be exhibited on this date. This will be measured by the presence of a fully working prototype on the day. We chose this project as an exciting and unique way to display data dynamically whilst illustrating the phenomenon of POV. For a detailed task list of attainable and timely goals that lead to this goal completion see below.