Initial Wiring of Single Axis Robot

All of the materials finished arriving yesterday for the single axis robot. This is a work project, essentially building a low-cost semi-automated test machine. I won't get into the exact purpose, but the materials used and programming will be a great stepping stone into a home-built CNC mill / router.

Materials used:

• 36" ball bearing slide with belt drive system & stepper motor, from e-bay
• Stepper motor power supply: 16034PS 36V 4.2A, from mpja.com
• Stepper drive: Geckodrive G251 from kelinginc.net
• microcontroller: Arduino from hacktronics
• display: LCD arduino kit from hacktronics

I'm first going to build a prototype system- essentially just a rough out using an old shelf for a mounting panel and some electrical boxes from Home Depot. I'm going to wire everything up, and finish the code. Once I have the system running well, I'll purchase a nice enclosure and make it look like a real piece of equipment.

One interesting thing I found is that the stock knock-outs in the galvanized steel box cover fit the emergency stop panel mount diameter just perfectly.

New Project: CNC (anything)

John and I have been talking about building something new and fun- a 3 axis CNC mill. It's amazing where things have gone the last several years in affordable, easy to use electronics. There are literally thousands of examples on the web where people have built their own CNC machines for a very reasonable price. The neat thing about this project is that:

A) the project itself should be fun and a great learning experience
B) once built, it can be used to make all kinds of neat, high precision parts for other projects.

Personally, I think it'll be great for making custom wing cores and cutting out plywood components for aircraft.

The timing seems right, since I'm also just starting a project at work where I need to build a simple piece of test equipment which will provide me with practice directly appliable to the CNC mill.

14.9 miles 17.6 Ave. Usual route

Sunday evening ride

After we returned home from the weekend trip to my cousin's wedding, I put in a quick ride:

14.71 miles @ 17.8 mph average. The first 13.3 miles were @ 18.8 mph, then I did the last leg through the highway 101 construction zone which slowed things down considerably.

Only three weeks left until the big race. Time to crank things into high gear.

19.3 miles 17.3 Ave. Usual am road route

The best moments are never on video...

Last night my neighbor Kai Kroll was over, and we were flying the Supercub off the lake. After 3 batteries between the two of us, Anna came down and decided to try a flight. Well, she put the airplane into a dive that I couldn't quite pull out of- and it smacked into the water really hard, with the floats belly-flopping into the water. The float mounts broke, and while the floats stayed on the water the airplane bounced upward. By this time I had control back, and I firewalled the motor to keep the now floatless airplane out of the water. All I could think of was crap, how am I going to land this? I was thinking that I could slow it down and ditch it into the weeds and big rocks on the shore. After regaining a little altitude, I throttled back and banked it back towards the dock. As it neared, I lined it up with the long part of the dock and continued to throttle back. I realized that I had it lined up perfectly to fly parallel with the shore to fly it right down the dock in front of the bench between the dock posts. Kai and Anna dove out of the way, and I chopped the throttle and reached up and grabbed the cub as it flew overhead. Amazingly I actually caught it without chopping my hand to bits or damaging the plane. Kai and Anna (any myself) were shocked- neither one of them even realized that the floats were still in the middle of the lake.

One more reason why there should always be a camera going when flying...

Last component of Backup Strategy

A month or two ago I added a DNS-321 network storage device. I moved all of our photos, documents, music, etc onto this device. Since this box has twin mirrored drives, there is some protection from physical drive failure. However, it doesn't have "previous versions" (which you'd have on a drive on your windows machine), plus if there is a fire, flood, theft etc I'd still lose my data. So, the final component is to add an off-site backup.

The most convenient and fail-safe method seems to be an online backup service. At work we use mozy.com, but mozy seems to be focused on business backup. One of my co-workers uses idrive, and had good things to say. So, today I signed up and started the backup process.

Essentially, for the initial backup it takes a long, long time to copy all of your data onto their secure servers. Once the initial backup is complete, each night it looks for new or changed files and only uploads the new files. Easy and relatively cheap, $4.95 per month for 150 Gb of storage.