R2-D2

So, I gook the R2 unit outside and sanded it off good, before going wild with a 2-component bond (Plastic Padding). This was supposed to harden within 10 minutes.

To my surprise it had still not hardened and really started stinking up the place real good after about an hour.

Guess it pays to take out *everything* from the box. It was a 2-component bondo, so I forgot to mix in the hardener..

Ah well, take it out again and scrape off as much as I could, before applying a new layer.

This time it DID harden, and I sanded most of the skirt. I will go over it once again before painting, but all in all, I’m really happy with how it came out.

What do you think?

Yesterday was another day with my cold still not allowing me to move about as I wanted, so it was a calm day. Spent the evening fiddling with the electronics, trying to get a small servo to move by remote control.

No result.

For starters, it seems I had put the LED’s on the controller card facing the wrong way. Guess it was a while ago I was soldering those analog synth modules…

Anyway, after removing the LED’s and trying everything again nothing worked still.

At least the LED’s lit up, but that didn’t really help me.

So, at this point, I figured I needed to get something out of the equation, so I called it a night and decided to go and pick up a tethered PS2 controller that is on the “supported” list of my controller card, instead of the unlisted wireless controller…

Back home after todays meetings and usual Friday stuff, I got to work.

Took the R2’s legs down from the shelf, made ankle wedges for them and removed my small caster I had previously installed in my wheels as I realized they would cause more problems.

Finally, It was all about lifting in the experimental wiring I had done on my desk into the R2.

Armed with nothing but tape, I mounted the circuit boards where I could attach them, and tried the controller.

Well .. it moved but not as I wanted. Seems there was still some fine-tuning to be done.

Once the channel mixing was engaged on the controller, another try, and this time, something different happened.

I caught it on film but it wasn’t as interested as when I put the dome on and put in my bluetooth speakers inside the body!

Behold: the first steps of R2 … now it really is starting to feel reel. I have an astromech!

After the successful test, I spent the rest of the evening, making a small, but much more neat and handy electronics board:

Notice the über-small 11.1V, 1.3 Ah Li-Po battery at the bottom. Using two 11.1V 6Ah Li-Po batteries rather than two 12V 7.2 Ah Lead batteries will cost about three times as much, but it will save me more than 4 kg’s inside the droid.. Still haven’t decided what to do, but for testing purposes, this will do just fine!

Please note that in this picture, the Sabretooth is not hooked up completely, and the Slip Ring connector board I haven’t even touched =)

Still .. again, it really feels like I have an astromech!