2 More Days To Zero-G: A Plan Starting To Come Together

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.