Archives for “Uncategorized”
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 [...]
Harpo is at the hospital right now as he needs to get a bad cough of his looked into. I am at his house, and I cannot make much progress on the car without Harpo here, so I have decided to do more research. We have decided that we are going to take out a [...]
Due to health circumstances, I am forced to leave for a little while. However, Lyle has called (and hell has frozen over) to say that he’ll be joining us. I also spoke to Simon on Saturday, and he plans to come by as well. Will and I found it somewhat amusing that we have the [...]
Will has arrived, and we are beginning work.
Enough legal jargon! I want some engineering! We’re going to work again on Monday, at my house. First on the agenda will probably be redesigning the transmission to lower the gearing ratio, as I previously posted about. We’ll also be refining the steering and possibly buttressing the suspension if necessary. Further posts will follow during [...]
We’ve registered the domain name carofawesomeness.com, but the trademarking process has been proving more difficult and expensive than we had expected. We’re researching our options, however for the moment, the process is somewhat stalled.
I was interested to discover a project even crazier than ours – the splinter. It is a super car made of wood. Joe Harmon Design
Will has begun the process of registering “Car of Awesomeness” as a trademark. We have the option of attaching a domain name to the trademark, but unfortunately, LEGO(R)’s Fair Play policy prevents us from using their name in a URL, so we cannot, for instance, use legocarofawesomeness.com. We are in the process of deciding if [...]