Archives for 2008
Harpo and I have been considering applying to become a nonprofit organization. The LC(A) has a bright but expensive future; we plan to upgrade to the NXT system eventually, and there are other costs such as pneumatics that might arise. There are twenty eight kinds of 501(c)(3)s, and although they are the most common kind [...]
We’ve created an experimental implementation of the new bevel “gears”. As of now, the car is in two large pieces; Will had to remove one of the ends, including the shock arms, wheels, and steering assembly, in order to install the new system. It looks like it may work very well, but we will need [...]
We may have found a way around the looming potential redesign. It is too early to tell for sure, but we are hopeful. We may be able to use some rather odd pieces which may or may not have been originally intended as gears to transfer torque instead of the older bevel gears. There will [...]
Well, we’re having some problems. To say the least. After installing the new steering systems at either end, we had a lot of problems with the gears not locking correctly in the drive train. When under a lot of force, the motor would stall and the gears would skip repeatedly. We reinforced and consolidated the [...]
We have successfully incorporated a worm gear into the steering rack. We used one of the weird double-beveled gears to achieve the right clearance. We are about to duplicate this system to the other side of the car, and then we will start working on the touch bumpers again.
We incorporated rack-and-worm drive systems into both the shifting assembly and the steering. We are still working on mounting the drive motor for the steering. We had a lot of trouble at first, but then we realized that we could use an intermediary gear between the worm and the rack. This makes it a lot [...]
As you can see, we are now on the new site. Please bear with us as we work on it. For the moment, you can see the Plog and the galleries here. Soon this section of the website will be integrated into the theme we are designing for the rest (you can see how it’s [...]
I am taking tomorrow off work, and Will and I will be working the entire day and part of Thursday morning. We are going to get a lot done. We also finally have the server information for the new location of the website, so by the end of our work, this Plog and the image [...]
Will’s gearbox system worked, but we decided to try a worm gear again. We’ve come up with a system that may work, but we have not finished it. We raised the worm gear up, and decreased the length of the rack, allowing us to place a gear on the worm shaft closer to the center [...]
Our main problem right now is the steering system. We are trying to find a way to make it slower and more powerful. We attempted to come up with a system that would drive the rack with a worm gear, but we had problems physically fitting a drive gear onto the worm gear’s axle without [...]
We have finished work for the day, and are currently cleaning up. We designed a new touch bumper based off of the one from the Mindstorms manual, extending the arms and remounting the touch sensors within the system, as well as redesigning the actual mount for the whole system. It functions almost perfectly. It will [...]
We are having a very hard time making the bumper system work. I spent about an hour and a half working on a system which we then completely discarded. This is a rather common occurrence; one of us has a brilliant idea which turns out to completely suck. This time it was my turn. I [...]
We are working on a new mounting system for the touch bumpers. One problem with the current one is that there is too much shear; the bumper twists when struck on the side. Ideally it will transfer the force of impact directly to the respective outboard touch sensor.
We’ll be working this weekend. After I get out of work on Saturday, we’re going to my school’s production of King Lear, and then Will is staying here. We will do some work Sunday morning before I have to work at 12.
We are done working. We are loading up my car with all of the stuff. We have not finished mounting the touch sensors. Although we came up with several ideas and built prototypes, none of them have worked properly. At the moment we are thinking of trying to mount the sensors vertically aligned with the [...]
We did some work on the shifting system, reinforcing the gearbox and bracing systems. This part is now complete, but we’ve run into problems in other areas. First of all, the touch bumpers have been far more complicated than we imagined. We have only now come up with a working model for them, and it [...]
We are finished working for the night, and are heading to sleep, as we have been getting decidedly silly and unproductive. We will pick up with the touch bumpers in the morning.
We just had a power outage. We’re now back online, and are going to do some work on the independent studies we are doing this year. We will spend some time on physics before deploying the calculus and getting to work on the Lego. We may also take advantage of Daylight Savings Time ending tomorrow [...]
We will be meeting this weekend at Will’s house. I am taking the SATs tomorrow morning, and will head up in the evening, stay over, and return on Sunday evening. I think we may be able to finish the physical construction this weekend and begin programming. All that remains are the touch bumpers.
We did it! We created a functional rack-and-pinion steering system! It works! Hooray! And other such exclamations of joy and excitement. We got a huge amount of work done today, building a completely new steering system which finally works. It was somewhat funny, because we put it together kind of as an afterthought. We had [...]
We will be meeting next weekend for both days. I am taking the SAT Saturday morning, and we will meet at my house afterwards. First priority will probably be the steering system. We have still been unable to create a working rack-and-pinion system, and no other type of system has worked properly so far, even [...]
We finished work a few hours ago, as Will had to get home. We did manage to complete the crank system for the transmission. We thought this would be the last major piece of construction we did, but we were unfortunately wrong. We have again taken apart the steering system. This marks at least the [...]
Will and I are having an unexpected work session today. So far, we’ve created a new system for moving the transmission between first and second gears. It’s based on a crank rather than a rack and pinion as we had before. It could potentially provide more power and be much more compact. We are also [...]
LEGO® finally got back to me on the RCX voltage issue, but they said they did not know, and referred me to Philo’s site. He has some excellent resources but his site did not answer our question. I e-mailed him and he promptly responded, shooting down our li-ion proposition, bringing into our awareness the possibility [...]
We have finished work for the day. We redesigned the transmission to incorporate a lower gearing ratio. This should solve the problem we had earlier of second gear not being powerful enough. We also completed a newly redesigned track system for the transmission to slide on. We did not finish reincorporating the gear system that [...]