Project F.I.S.I.K.A.

Turns out, plastic isn't such a great material for sudden speed changes throwing heavy weights around and high demand for torque.

I put as much thought into balance and structural reinforcement as I could, while at the same time trying to keep weight down, and one of the main supporting L-brackets ended up snapping.

Because I was using 4 of them, I was able to keep going just fine, although I turned down the power and supported some of the joints by hand as I experimented with the range of motion.

3 degrees of freedom is nice, for starters, but ideally I'd like an arm with ~5 or more, and that's just not possible with the few, heavy servos I have. I'll revisit this in the future, when I can pick up some proper servos and 3D print a few joint pieces and build this thing with steel rods, or if I get really into it, perhaps some carbon fiber.

Until then, I'm back to building a zippy little self-balancer. I love these things so much....

Back when I acquired the NXT, it ran on 6AA batteries, so I bought a charger and an 8-pack of ~2500 mAh batteries.

The charger had 4 slots, so this allowed me to have 2 always in the charger and 6 in the NXT. When it came time to recharge the batteries, I would just empty the charger and NXT, and put 4 dead ones in the charger. I already had 2 fully-charged at that point, so once the first batch of batteries was finished charging, I had all I needed, with 2 dead ones left over.

It wasn't the fastest swap-out system, since I still had to fully-charge batteries, but it was faster than having to do two runs. However, I've got a shipment coming in the mail! a 12 pack of batteries with a 4-port charger. Sure, I still can't charge 6 at a time, but holy hell! I can have an entire second set of batteries charged up and ready for swapping by the time the first 6 die, since it takes a whole lot longer to drain them than it does to charge them!

As usual, though, there's always a tarnish to the silver lining of the cloud. It turns out, this package won't be arriving until the 8th or 9th—which is right before Mother's day, and then my birthday is immediately after that! So not only do I have a busy weekend trying to handle stuff for my mum, but I'm also releasing an album on my birthday as my gift to the world. (You can find that over on my BandCamp, SoundCloud, SFX.io, Vimeo, and YouTube on or after 5.11.15).

So in less than a week, I have to:

• Send out a package for my mum

• Get my coding setup going since the NXT will have power finally

• Finish things up so my album can go live on my birthday, 5.11.15

It's been a long time coming, but I finally got my NXT unit shipped out across the country so I could start tinkering with it... but the components have been separated into two shipments, and I have no idea when the second will arrive.

The primary parts—the brain, the servos, the wires, the sensors—those are all here. The pieces necessary to build the actual structure, on the other hand, are not entirely here.

At the very least I'll be able to dust off my copy of Parallels and start coding again! That's honestly the hardest part of all this, but for now it's all I can work on, so I guess that works out. I might have to hack together a power supply, since I'm not a fan of batteries, and my reliable rechargeables are disappearing as friends 'borrow' them for this or that.

So I've got the hardware designed, and actually had to go back and make a few changes as I was poking around in Blender and realized some of my parts were, for lack of a better term, in each other. I think "intersecting" is the term kids these days use.

After re-engineering some of the brace designs to make them more sturdy, and also exist in a mere 3 Euclidean planes, I've (hopefully) finished the hardware and now I'm just waiting on it to actually get shipped out here. That's something I have no control over; if I had the money I'd just fly across the country, pick up a few boxes, and fly back, but that's not really an option for me right now.

Once things get shipped over to the western side of the country I'll be able to actually start constructing with them, and hopefully that part will go very quickly. Cable routing will be a pinch, even though I don't have it in any of the renders, but that's more due to the fact that my modeling software is very old and doesn't have good soft-body modelling features, and I'm nowhere near good enough to set it up in Blender.

Tl;dr — had to make some revisions to let the arm exist properly in only 3 dimensions, and waiting for parts to arrive so I can finally begin working on it.

After a bit of cleaning up my Windows partition, I had enough space to actually use it for things other than coding, so I tweaked a few settings for performance's sake and installed blender. After jumping through a few hoops to get LEGO models imported correctly, I was then faced with the arduous task of fixing the problems with the model.

Apparently, the people who put many hours of work into designing hundreds of thousands of LEGO pieces got tired of doing all the same parts over and over again, and started copy-pasting normals and such from one part to the next, but unfortunately forgot to keep an eye on which side the faces were pointing. As a result, many of the parts in my models have odd holes in them, or with a setting changed to fix the holes, the lighting and shading effects become buggy.

As a result, I've been spending lots of time just zooming in on each piece and selecting faces that are backwards and inverting them. Tedious manual work, and while there is an automatic tool to do it for me, it doesn't really work because there are so many polygons that need fixing....

As of now it's almost done. Next steps will be to correctly align the gearing system, parent the necessary groups of parts, and then rig them together.

I've put lots and lots of work into this project so far. Technically, aside from coding it, it's completely done, and I've already started work on coding, so there's that. But by far the most important step for me was getting all my thoughts, sketches, mental notes, etc arranged in a way that I could post them here, and they'd be readable!

As such, I'm making my first Project Log about simply posting here. Currently, as mentioned, I don't have physical access to my LEGOs. They're packed up in a box back at my previous home, when I was living with my parents, and they won't ship them out to me, so until I can cough up the money to make a cross-country round-trip visit, things will stay that way. My next few project logs will be renders and animations, as I'm working with a close friend to fully rig the model in Blender to test my motion planning code. (: