Category: General blogging

Accomplished!

Garden’s free of scrap metal, and managed to jam in some food shopping while out. The claws got sanded down and shipped, the test of the new fleece got started, silicone was ordered, rawl plugs were found, the wall-table at the Hackspace has been fitted to the wall, and I’ve brought home the things I was storing in my box.

Bonus; Billy showed me where the bits he’d been removing from all his salvaged bike frames had gone, so I now have a nice selection of handlebars to choose from. One’s an alloy one, which should be perfect for the roadbike, and there’s a few other heavier ones in different styles that may be better options for the half-horse-trike.

Now to settle with my tea, throw out a few quick replies to people and do some doodling.

While passing by Shorditch High Street station today, I saw something unusual. A sort of street market had popped up under the rail bridge, with rough looking people peddling meagre wares. If I was going to go by looks alone, I’d have said the sellers were a mix of homeless and more wily opportunistic folk. There were t-shirts, trousers, jackets, scarves hung all over the fences and a wide range old electronics and bric-a-brac spread over the pavement. It looked like the leftovers of a car-boot sale or the contents of donation bags usually left outside charity shops. Notably there were also a large portion of old mobile phones and bicycle parts. The sort of bike parts that are conspicuously absent from those abandoned bike frames still chained to lamp-posts across the city.

There seemed to be some sort of more official market going on up the street, so I wonder if this was some form of illegal spill-over, trying to grab people on their way to or from the official market and get them to pay for what I would have called scavengings.

Accomplished day

2 orders of claws cast
Replacement set of paw-pads cast
Note from buyer saying paw-pads lost in post have arrived (so replacement set now spare for sale)
Dell drive rails arrive and fit Precision 530 chassis
Replacement capacitors arrive and got them soldered onto the HP1502 monitor power-board (now running fine after 1 hour)
Moved workshop power strip and fitted stainless-covered shelf for oils etc
Identified the playback problem on indoor PC as a driver issue (Version 270.61 on an 8600GT under XP. 266.58 would not install. 260.99 seems to be running fine)
New HDD arrives tomorrow anyway. Whoops, looks like it wasn’t needed afterall, but it will help out. Machine could use a clean install by now and it’ll free up a 160Gb IDE drive for one of the other machines.
Foam sheets laid out, test sample cut, and glues VERY well with UHU. Next, paint & foot mechanism.

Tomorrow posting several orders, receiving the HDD, paying NI bill, costume planning and such..

Camera, motor, kittens

Going through the workshop, making small improvements and sorting some things out.

For one, after several months of it bothering me, I knocked together a better mount for the angle-poise webcam.

Doesn’t look like much, but now the tilt is on top of the pan pivot rather than the other way around. The previous one was smaller but meant the image was only level when looking directly forward (along the line of the arm). Turning to show what I was doing to the left or right meant the image turned on it’s side. This way the image should remain level and I’ll be able to manuver the camera closer to the action.

In my sorting, I also scrapped some broken battery drills that either had dead batteries, broken chargers or damaged electronics. So I have four sets of low-voltage motors with reduction gearboxes and torque-limiters, and one electric screwdriver with just the motor & gearbox.

I haven’t checked yet, but Wikipedia suggests about the maximum torque you can expect from a battery drill is around 30Nm.

I’d been considering using them to make a large track-mounted robot arm, but at only 30Nm it’s unlikely they’d be able to make the arm move under it’s own power, let alone do anything useful.

If I packed out the torque control spring I could have them continue to run at higher levels, but I’ll still need more powerful motors I suspect. I’ll be looking into what’s cheaply available. Initial enquiries suggest radio-control vehicle motors won’t have enough torque. Steppers may be another option.

I’m envisioning something of a comparable reach to that of a human arm, so about 30cm between joints.

And finally, we still have some kittens looking for good homes.

Awwwww