SATRAN - Satellite Tracking Antenna

Today was the day I fired up the injection molding machine for the first time. Literally, "fired up". It worked like a charm the first few minutes, but then in an instant it smoldered nasty white smoke all over the apartment. Thank god for emergency stop buttons.

After some guessing, I found out a few errors to fix. First I need to adjust the PID thermocontrollers to have a slower cycling of the heaters, plus relocate the thermocouplers ("sensors") closer to the actual heaters for a faster response.

The main fault was that one thermocoupler was mounted directly to the nozzle block, which because of its size and mass heats up a lot slower than the actual barrel inside the heater element. Therefore the plastic closest to the heater probably goes up to over 250 degrees celsius (500 fahrenheit) before the nozzle even have reached 150. 

Some insulation around the nozzle is also probably a good idea. 

Plus, next time I will definitely bring the whole setup outside =) 

The list is long of all the todos, but yesterday I finally got the new app improvements working. Automatic kepler retrieval from Celestrak, with a search functionality. Now you always have the latest TLEs ("coordinates") in your app, plus you can easily swap between sats.

But there's a lot more coming. I am making a world map that shows where the satellite is, plus a manual rotator control, plus automatic IP search, automatic GPS position retrieval, remove the need for restarts between sat changes etc etc etc

Today I built the last remaining part for the injection molding machine; a spring mount for the actual barrel that will contain the melted plastic. With this, you can put your mold a few millimeters under the nozzle and when pressure is applied from above, it gets pushed down against the mold, giving a decent seal. 

But now its time for coffee to get some energy back. Unfortunately I experienced a nasty customer trolling and threatening me despite me being friendly, trying to solve the issue and even issued a refund. But thats the downside of doing business, sometimes you have to deal with some rotten eggs. Telling from some forum threads, its apparently not his first time making trouble. Thankfully the mails I get once a week or so from customers praising me for my great customer support and innovative product is what gets me up in the morning. Thank you, and keep em coming!

Yup, tomorrow is probably the day when I finish the injection molding machine. It's been a great run, but soon it is time to see if it will work as intended. At least the electronics are working now, with double thermostats and (at least for my small workshop) a massive hydraulic setup. *fingers crossed*

For the injection molding to work, I need to have molds. Yesterday I started with my first ever try at milling aluminum in my homebuilt CNC-machine. It started off quite okay, but then suddenly the z-axis dropped and buried its nose deep in the aluminium stock. The code and everything seems okay, so I am wondering if it was the stepper motor going crazy thanks to excessive heat. 

Today I have put a heatsink and a fan on the motor, hopefully that will do the trick. Otherwise my next experiment will be to make molds in a somewhat softer material like polyurethane or polyester, because aluminium is both tricky, hard and expensive.

Today I got time to finish the assembly instructions, which required a lot of pictures. But now it's as good as it needs to be, for everyone to be able to put together their kit. And together with the video, I would be very surprised if anyone managed to mess up their build =)

The full instructions can be found at www.satran.io/downloads

The assembly instructions for the satellite rotator has been sparse, since I made a video I assumed that would be enough. But it seems some prefer the printed version, so today I started a much more detailed manual with a photo for every step. Ingvar Kamprad would have been proud... (for those who arent Swedes, he's the founder of IKEA)

Welding together the big frame for the injection molding machine was the easy part. Now comes all the small stuff that takes up all the time, but makes all the difference. Todays mission is to make holders for the temperature sensors which will give a good connection against the circular cylinder where all the melted plastic goes. It's the aluminium block you see in the lower right...

Also the brass end plug needs to be transformed into a makeshift nozzle, which is why Im taking a trip later this week to my metal shop out in the woods. The nozzles need to be machined nicely and get a hole drilled through the middle in a perfectly sized diameter (that I have no clue about). I think I'll start with 3mm.

The injection molding machine is going according to plan (so far). Now I am about halfway finished until I can fill it up with ABS pellets and start melting...

The tower on top is for the hydraulic piston and the heated nozzle, which is gonna be quite large. It has an outer diameter of 42mm and stroke length of 200mm. It will hopefully enable me to make quite large parts, around 15x15x5cm (over 5x5x2 inches for those who dont speak metric).

The welds are definitely not beautiful, but holds up. My old welding machine had a crack in the hose so the protective gas never reached the nozzle. Therefore I switched to some cheap flux-filled thread instead that is pure crap, but still better than nothing. So number one on my christmas list... a new welder!

It takes forever to print the large parts, which is one of the reasons I am now completely redesigning them to minimize material. The other reason is that I am preparing for injection molding, which requires both fillets, draft angles and a whole different set of rules than 3D-prints.

Even if I never get to injection molding, this will cut the volume and mass of the main parts by up to 50%, saving time and money.