Thursday, March 22, 2007

Received Battery Chargers, More Drivetrain Assembly, Finished Footshell Filling

Today I received the battery chargers for the main batteries that will power my droid. I'm still waiting on the actual batteries, they should arrive soon. The charger I received a couple of days ago is for the remote control transmitter and receiver batteries.



I did some more assembly work on the drivetrain tonight. I needed to see how everything fit together before I drill the final few holes.



I think (and hope) that I'm just about done with the foot shell finishing work. I filled the last of the small voids in a small edge of each of the outer shells with Bondo.

As a reminder, a large portion of the inboard side of these outer foot shells will be completely cut out and removed to allow the drivetrain to pass through, into the battery boxes (which will also need to be cut). Thus, I did not bother finishing that area of the foot shells to perfection.

Tomorrow I'll sand, and then I think the foot shell finishing is complete. Yes, I still need to attach the doors. I'll get to that eventually...

5 comments:

Calvin Thomas said...

Those Drives are Awesome!!!!
I was wondering if there's somewhere to look at a finished set. I was also wondering how they work as far as when R2 turns sharp, Do the have any drag between the 2 wheels.
Do you know if the Pancake motor has been used in this setup?
I feel the setup I built may fail,
The wheels may burn down too fast.

Victor Franco said...

Calvin,

I've seen this system in Mike Senna's R2. The turn radius is pretty tight. Not zero, but certainly within reason.

There are some good CG renderings that Heath and Alex generated at:

http://www.alexkung.com/R2D2/11/iir05.htm

As far as I know, this system has only been used with the Saturn wiper motor, but it may well be possible to adapt it to work with other types of motors. This design requires that the drivetrain overflow into the battery boxes, I think that can probably be avoided with pancake motors.

-Victor

Anonymous said...

Victor,

What is the plan for the charger? Your batteries are 6v but the charger is for 12V. Also, it apears that the connector on the charger does not match the battery. Is there a harness set-up that Mike uses and then charge the batteries in series?

Victor Franco said...

To be perfectly honest, I'm not entirely sure how the recharger works. I blindly followed Mike's advice on the purchase. However, the connectors do split up, so it looks like they can be hooked up to a pair of 6v batteries. I'll let you know when I find out more.

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