Really quick update since it’s so late:
- Mike Judson prototyped our current preferred method of passing the electrical power and signals from the non-rotating boom deployer box into the boom. This method uses a coiled ribbon cable, which is just an extension of the ribbon cable we’re going to attach to the inner surface of the boom. The nice thing is that this allows you to connect the wires going down the boom into the fixed boom deployer box without needing a rotating electrical slip ring joint:
- Wayne’s jamming away on the gripper parts. We’re expecting to have something coming overnight tomorrow, so it’ll be in on Friday.
- One of the non-technical things I’ve been working on is closing out the financing round that’s making this project possible. We have commitments from our investors, but before they can send us money, we needed to get the proper paperwork in place, to protect both them and us. We were able to get some help from a friend of mine with a lot of Angel investing background, and we should have the convertible note paperwork in place and money in the bank from this round within the next week or so. I don’t want to go into too much details (both because I don’t know what I can say in public about a private financing round, and also because I haven’t asked our investors how much I should say). But the good news is that we should have bucks soon to fund the Buck Rogers.
- We’ve also been ordering and receiving in a lot of the piece parts we’ll need for the gripper.
- AJ’s jumping in on some preliminary work for the next rev gripper design. It’s risky, because if we make big changes, he may have to redo a bunch of work, but most likely even if we change some things there’ll be a lot of overlap, so jumping in on that now gives us more time to do testing and design iteration later.
- Mike and I are working on boom deployer box and mechanism. We’re hoping to get that finalized and out for fab no later than Friday, and have all the pieces in to start assembling it around when Mike shows up in Colorado on the 4th or 5th.
I’ll hopefully have more eyecandy on the boom deployer and maybe some pictures from Wayne’s machining sometime tomorrow.