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!