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.