Saturday, December 21, 2013

After a long break....


After a long break, i finally had a chance to get a bit more work done on R2.  During this time i focused mainly on the leg assembly.  I started out by taking the blueprints provided through the Astromech R2D2 Builders Club and printed them off on 2 banner sized posters at my local office max.  Carefully measuring each dimension i was able to get the two pieces to line up perfectly!  Once i had this done i used carbon copy paper to transfer the blueprints onto some poster board and later on to a piece of 1/4th " birch plywood to use as a template later on.  Due to having a bit of a time constraint when i got my birch wood after going to multiple Home Depots and Lowes' to find decent pieces of wood... i only had time to cut each piece down to size for easy transport.  While building the legs i plan to follow the process laid out by Victor Franco.




~Jacob



Saturday, November 30, 2013

Dome Painted

I took my first crack at paining the dome today.  I have not had much experience using spray paint before so my work came out not meeting my expectations.  Using Eastwood MRO Chrome Galvanizing Coating spray paint in our University's painting booth i put the first coat of paint on the dome.  As you can see i was holding the can to close to the project and need to touch up on a few spots, hopefully by sanding down a few spots and 1-2 more coats of paint i could get away with incorporating it into my "weathering".

~Jacob



Monday, November 4, 2013

Broken Parts

i decided to try my luck using a Makerbot instead of our schools professional 3D printer, in the end it was not the best choice.  All the parts using the blue plastic were made using the Makerbot 2.0 and as you can see in the picture below, will not be used in my project.


~Jacob

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Misc Updates

Well this one is not as formal as the rest of my meeting posts but here are some the of the Misc things that have been worked on between all these gaps.

LED budget display
after finding a youtube video of a R2D2 Builders Group member using a led belt buckle when designing his logical displays i decided to copy his idea from the front logic displays.  This takes away one less thing to worry about when doing the electrical components and programming later on.

3D Printed Parts
A lot of work has been done.  Between July and August all the C.A.D models have been finished and all that remains is the printing process.  We are able to print off one part every 3 days or so so this might take awhile.  so far we have the coin slots, side vents and pocket vents printed off (as well as the CPU arms from earlier)

Paint
While no painting has been done yet, we did some paint testing using plastic cups (thanks to the people on R2D2 Builders Group for the suggestions) and decided to use Eastwood Almost Chrome for our silver/grey colors on the dome and for our blue we are using Dupli-Color Sonic Blue Pearl BFM0378.


In the mean time i have been helping out teaching some more S.T.E.M classes involving soldering/programing and some good old Lego Mindstorms.  Speaking of Lego Mindstorms, as the F.I.R.S.T First Technical Challenge comes along this year i might be a little busy being a mentor for a local highschool.

~Jacob
Meeting #8
August 31st 2013
Duration: 30 Minutes
Attendance: Jacob, Nate

It was the start of the school year, i had multiple friends ask me to join this project over the summer.  I though why not have an introductory meeting for all those wanting to join, try to catch them up to speed on why i am doing this project and what has been done and what still needs to be done.  After a day of planning, writing everything up, and 2 hours of pre-meeting set up....Only my good friend Nate shows up who already knows what is going on.  So much for that idea.

Anyways i will post my Gant Chart as well as a few other project statements here shortly for reference.


Note: August was a very layed back month in terms of the project for me.  I spent the month taking a class at the university as well as teaching some S.T.E.M classes each week to local middle school and high school students.  Needless to say they all loved R2D2.

~Jacob
Meeting #7
07/27-28/2013
Duration: 180 Minutes each day
Attendance: Jacob, Nate

During this meeting we finished up the rockler bearing that we started two weeks ago.  After finally getting our Teflon spray and we once again cleaned out the bearing, sprayed on a coat of Teflon and put the bearing back together. During this process we took advantage of the bearing being apart and we marked/drilled/countersunk the necessary holes in the frame as well as the bearing.  That Sunday the 28th we went to our local hardware store to pick up the washers, bolts and nuts needed to mount our bearing.  After a dumb oversight of getting the wrong heads on the bolts by myself, we finally got everything mounted.  The bearing was much more quiet and spun more freely making close to a full revolution before coming to a stop.

~Jacob

*pictures to come soon*

Glued Together

Meeting #6
July 20th 2013
Duration: 300-420 Minutes
Attendance: Jacob

After

After having the frame for a long period of time, I finally came to the conclusion that it was finally time to glue all the pieces together.  This was a much bigger project that i had first anticipated.  Taking well over 4-5 hours to take apart and reassemble and glue each piece took quiet some time.  especially since i made sure no glue was showing at the end and constantly cleaning up little mistakes.  I wish i could say everything went according to plan but later on i found out i glued a piece in at a small angle which would prevent me from skining R2 later on.  I put this issue off for now and just called it a day.  I will use a heat gun to remelt the glue and re-position the piece later.

~Jacob

*Pictures to come soon*

Quick Update

I apologize for not having updated my progress in awhile.  With class starting I have been very busy and have very little time to physically build anything.  A bunch of progress has been made however in the creature of our C.A.D parts along with printing them out on Marquette's 3D printer.  More pictures and updates will come soon, as well as some recaps of meetings that went on from July-August.

~Jacob

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Meeting Five
Attendance: Jacob, Nate
Time: 120 Minutes

we started off this meeting by looking over some CAD parts that we had been working on.  We then started on what was to be the main focus of this meeting, to finish up the Rockler bearing.  we had just cleaned out the excess grease during the last meeting.  We decided to use WD40 as a lubricant and place the bears back in the metal rings.  While this did improve the amount of "spin" that the bearing achieved it was painfully noisy.  we gave in an ordered the acetal bearings and got ahold of a can of the teflon spray needed.  we also marked out exactly what needs to be drilled next week on the drill press.

We then decided to move onto the electrical components of R2D2.  Previously Jacob came up with a printed circuit board in order to control an 8x8 led matrix.  This was done to get some practice before creating the 5x8 matrices that are used for the small logic displays.  Jacob gave a short tutorial to Nate on how to solder and the printed circuit board was completed

an hour later.



After this was done Jacob ran across a youtube video of a budget way of controlling the lighting in the small logic displays.


~Jacob

Saturday, August 3, 2013

Other Small Projects

I was recently given a box of old electronic components (its like giving candy to a kid).  With all the endless possibilities to go through i stumbled across some old disposable cameras, and what better to do with old disposable cameras than to make...... A taser!

A simple concept of being able to charge up the capacitor on the board around redirecting the current away from the flash mechanism.  However unlike most taser projects online i made mine a little more unique and user friendly.  by keeping the flash component of the camera on the board and adding in a toggle switch i can choose to quickly discharge the taser and creating a blinding flash.  It was a short lived project and probably only got two days of use before it was thrown back into the electronics box, but what a great two days it was.

~Jacob


Saturday, July 13, 2013

Meeting #4
July 6th 2013
Duration: 150 Minutes
Attendance: Jacob, Nate

Jacob and Nate got together to go over what we have discovered about led matrices.  We figured out what we would need and designed a printed circuit board and gathered all the components in order to create one of the small logic displays.  After this we took apart our Rockler Lazy Susan bearing, cleaned out all the grease and prepared it for drilling to start the process of getting the dome mounted. Looking back on this i really should have worn gloves... At the end of the meeting the 1:1 scale blueprints for R2D2's legs were sent off to the poster printer to have a scale blueprint to trace out instead of redrawing them out.

~Jacob

Two halves of Rockler bearing
Rockler after being cleaned and polished



Friday, July 12, 2013

Meeting #3
June 30th 2013
Duration: 90 minutes
Attendance: Jacob, Nate

Jacob and Nate met up in the DLC in order to gather electrical components and to start brainstorming ideas for the logic displays.  after gathering breadboards, led matrix displays and many other fun electronics we got our hands on an arduino uno and starting self teaching ourselves how to create led matrix displays.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

Timeline of Events

Timeline of events pre-blog

September-October 2012
Much talk of this project had been taking place between Jacob, Bob and Nate however no actions were put into place until the beginning of October when our journey began.


First Meeting: October 2nd-3rd 2012
Attendance: Jacob, Bob
Time: 90 Minutes each day
Objective: Sand/clean up wood and Dry Fit

The first part of the R2D2 has come in, during this meeting we unboxed and dry assembled the frame for the first time.  the next day we sanded down each part to get a smooth fit and kept the frame assemble in our project locker.  We were missing a piece to our back door and we received a replacement part 3 months later.

Un-assembled parts
 




"Second Meeting" October 2012-May 2013
Attendance: N/A
Time: N/A
Objective: Fit in any work possible during classes as engineers!

As classes became more challenging our project was put on a temporary freeze.  during this time Jacob gathered supplies and materials but no formal meetings had occurred.  A lot of individual work was done during this time frame designing over 50 different CAD Parts for later use thanks to Jacob and Nate.

First 3d Printed Part - Utility Arms
Using UGS NX7.5 we used the blueprints from the yahoo builders group to create a CAD model of the utility arms and print them out at Marquette's Engineering workshop or the DLC (Discovery Learning Center)
Utility Arms Printed in ABS

Vacuum Formed Skirt
Using the Blueprints on the yahoo builders group we created a styrene mold in our schools vacuum mold machine.

2 Pittman Motors We picked up on Astromech.net 
Jacob Bought These off a fellow member on the astromech forums, the one that currently has a mounting plate and a belt wheel will be used to drive the dome.

A&A Gear Set we ordered
Jacob Bought a A&A Plastic Gear set to go along with the Rockler Lazy Susan bearing that was purchased.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

Welcome to Marquette University's R2D2 project.  On this site we will keep track of the progress made on this project for future reference.  While a lot of things have been done over the past year by Jacob Osborne, before this blog has been created this will be maintained by the entirely of our group of college students.


~Jacob Osborne