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Date: September 17, 2007
Days left until R2LA V: 12
Not a very productive day of building, though I did get a lot of logistical stuff taken care of at lunch time.
Yesterday was R2's birthday, and I forgot to mention it!!! (Well, as I write this, it was yesterday.) His birthday was on the 16th. That's the day that I sent off the bucks to buy the parts kit. I did not start building until months later, but I consider this the official beginning.
Today at lunch, I did some R2 business. I went down to the local "Hobby People", which is a chain of hobby shops. I usually don't like them, as they tend to sort of cater to a very general audience, but I'm boycotting "Gyro Hobbies", which has devolved over the years into a fanboy run den if disaster. I swear, trying to get one of the hipsters, oops, I mean employees to help you is tantamount to pulling teeth. Attitude galore. It's like they hired all the displaced Tower Records employees over there... and now they're all TWICE as angry and bitter about living in a world that just doesn't understand them.
Sorry, now I'm ranting.
Anyhow, I went to Hobby People to pick up a back up battery for the remote control receiver. The one I have works just fine, but I've read too many stories about the power going out mid performance. Of course, it would be far more mission critical if this was an air craft or something, but it would still be pretty embarassing. My ultimate goal is to have both batteries onboard, with a toggle switch between them. When one runs out, you switch to the other. But that's for version 2.0. The good news is that HP had the battery I was looking for. In fact, they did me one better. For about ten bucks more, I got a 1,600 mAh version. The one that came with the futaba is only rated at 600. So this battery charge should last almost three times as long. That's cool.
Next stop was Best Buy. One of my favorite stores, and I'm happy to give them my money. I was searching for a new flash memory card for my sound system. The smallest card they had was 1Gb. I didn't really need that much memory, as I figured half of that would do. However, they don't stock cards that small anymore. And the one they had listed in the inventory computer actually cost more than the 1Gb. So One Giga it is. I suppose ultimately this will give me more flexibility with the sound card, in case I ever take full advantage of the extra touch senses on the CFIII. It will also allow me to leverage the "multiple sounds for one button" feature better. Which might be cool. I was thinking I might have like a series of "raspberries" linked to one button, a series of processing noises, cries, whatever. It'll make him more dynamic. My current plans are simply to link the two cantina songs up to one button. I'm going to go back through my sound library and pick ANYTHING that I think is cute. Now that I know how to make that trick work, it seems a shame not to take full advantage of it.
When I got home, the first thing I did was attack the CFIII. I fixed the mis-wiring problem I discovered yesterday, and the buttons are now corresponding properly to the touch sense points. However, I did discover one problem. It's not really a problem, it's just that the board functions differently than I hoped. My goal was to hook multiple sounds up to multiple buttons. Sadly, CFIII only supports multiple sounds on ONE button. So I can have buttons 1 through 11 hooked up to a single sound, and button 12 can cycle through a series. Ideally, I would have liked to have buttons 11 and 12 cycle through different sets. Not a big deal though, i'll just have to re-evaluate. I think what I will do is find a bunch of sounds that are random chatter. Non descript. Not excited. Not raspberries. Just chatter. I'll pick ten, and hook those up to one button. That way, if anyone is trying to have a conversation with R2, he can insert random sounding noises after their responses. I'll need to make sure that the clips are in order such that similar sounding ones don't follow each other.
I've put together a list of all remaining tasks that I can think of. This list excludes installation of the drive system and body electronics.
Here's the task list for the electronics and drive system
I painted the cylinder wedges with the standard four coats. Two of base purple, and two of kandy blue. I also touched up the booger I was repairing on the booster cover. These are now ready for clear coating. I'll get to that tomorrow.
I also glued in the hydros and buttons. I did this by taking out the screws on the back side, then covering the threads with Maxim glue. Then I just screwed them back in. Did this to all the gizmos on the shoulder hubs.
The last thing I did for the evening was to depth set the screws that hold the shoulder hubs in place on the shims. I came up with a very simple solutin for making sure the screws are at precisely the right depth. I removed the shoulder hub shims, and set them in place on the back of the hubs. Then I applied Maxim to the threads, and sunk the screws in until they made contact with the shim. Voila! I tested to make sure the shim could slide out without too much difficulty. So the hubs are snug, but can still be removed without much effort. Totally cool!
And that's all for today. Not a ton of work, but I did knock down a few tasks, and that's always good. I think tomorrow I will try to get the clear coat onto those remaining blue parts. The aluminum strips for the feet should also be cured by then. I checked on them today, and they didn't take fingerprints, so that's good. I think they'll be ready to install tomorrow.
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