Since I’m starting the blog post at 1am, this will be really terse. Sorry. More pics/vids tomorrow:
- We got the drive system working pretty well today. We’ve done a bunch of boom deploy/retract cycles now, and it seems to be working fairly well. We may want to work on it a bit more after the flight, but right now we’re pretty close to something that’ll work for the Zero-G flight.
- We got the gripper parts in, the pads assembled, and the gripper hardware to the point where we’ll be wiring it up tomorrow.
- We got the electronics far enough that it has all the basic functionality (deploy, retract, and the buttons driving the joint locking and EA activation logic.
- We got the HMI sheet metal sourced, and the parts fabbed. Have I mentioned that AJ is a virtuoso when it comes to a Dremel? We still need to clean the parts up, put finishing touches on, etc. But we made huge progress on that today.
- We got the ribbon cable bonded into the boom (this was a bigger hassle and risk than it sounds), and were running the boom deployer this evening a few times with the cable in. So far it seems to be working, but I definitely want to go with built-in wiring for future booms. We also got the holes punched in the end of the boom to allow for the mounting of the gripper head.
- We designed and had started the remaining sheet metal pieces.
- Brandon Seifert, who is doing a sort of “videography internship” with us, is putting together a pretty cool highlight reel. We’ll hopefully have it ready to post tomorrow.
Still a lot to do tomorrow. Will probably be changing our flight schedule on Friday to get a later flight to give us more time to get things together on Friday. Exhausted but happy that things are starting to come together.
Really nice work guys. Love what you’ve done to our tube, really nice deployment mechanism.
We’ve got three space themed R&D programmes running at the moment, with another maybe on the way. Love to set up a chat to see if there’s any way we can help each other.
Hope it all goes well!
Stefan
Stefan,
It’s been great to work with, but next time we’re going to do a custom one with the wires already built into the boom. 🙂
~Jon
Not a problem – we’ve been doing a fair bit on putting wires and sensors into them!
Stef
Stefan,
You have any 3m long x ~2in OD Battlemasts with wires already in them? Like say 5-6 conductors? 🙂
~Jon
GO JON GO!