Sunday, March 28, 2010

Legs and Body are One

Finally. Finally, R6-C9 has his legs on. This is the droid I've been waiting for.
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According to the general club blueprints, the shoulders are a half-inch from the body. Since the body is 18", the total pipe length should be 19" (18 + half-inch on each side). To secure the pipes at this length I drilled two 3/8" holes straight through the pipes and placed a 3/8" X 2" hex bolt into each hole.
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Be careful when doing this. The drill bit and the pipes get very warm to the touch. You may see a little white smoke. If the drill bit gets too hot it will deform and become useless. So take it slow. Use a drill press so the hole is straight.

Gonna take a little break from the shop (not as long as last time hopefully).

I just received some parts for the audio playback for R6. In an earlier post I said I was going to use the CFIII for the audio. Well that'll be over $200. So instead I'm going to use a little device called the VMusic2. This is a device that plays MP3 or WMA audio files, and is read off of a USB flash drive. However, it needs a microcontroller added to work. For this, I've chosen the Adruino. Specifically the Arduino Duemilanove. Click here to read about it at the R2 Builder's forum. Basicly, the Arduino is a brain for controlling just about anything. Of course you have to program it to get it to do anything. This will be quite the learning curve for me. I don't know hardly anything about programming. Should be fun to see how this works out. Others have done this so I should be able to as well. How I'll have it setup is when I push a button on my remote, it'll trigger the Arduino to tell the VMusic2 to play a random sound. That's it. I may setup a 2nd button to select different sound directories on the flash drive, for example one directory will be sad sounds, another happy, another for music, etc..
On the right is the Arduino, left is the VMusic2. Each is the size of a cell phone.
Audio components

Laterz,

John

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