Junior Week 16

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This week was, again, quite slow. I’m once again waiting on my two main projects, so I’ve been doing some smaller robotics team things and continuing to work on my water jet guide.

On Wednesday I cut off all of the super high-gauge motor cable extensions are replaced them with lower-gauge ones. These should not be points of failure like the previous ones might have been.

Thursday I soldered our new ethernet cable onto its Blue Trail Engineering connector. This new ethernet cable is stranded, so it’s far more flexible than our old one. This new ethernet cable has not yet been potted.

In addition to soldering the motor cable extensions, I helped Milo Austin operate the water jet as he was cutting a hole in a ceramic tile of the Construction shop. This was the first time I’d cut in a super brittle material like ceramic and I certainly learned some important things about the water jet in the process.

Throughout the week, whenever I didn’t have anything else to do, I was working on my water jet guide. I’d say it’s about halfway done as of 2023-12-21. I do wonder how much it’ll actually get used, as I know I wouldn’t want to learn how to use the water jet just from a guide. I’d want an actual person to teach me.

Junior Week 14

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This week I redesigned the ESC PCB with all of the knowledge I learned from my first attempt.

This new version will address the two main problems with the ESC PCB v1. The primary thing that is different is the connectors. This version will use XT30 connectors, which should hopefully have a lower resistance. I also had a chance to remake my footprint of the Blue Robotics ESC. I learned that I need far less clearance then I thought I did, so the ESC can be packed together closer. This allow the power input and signal connectors to be places away from each other and not overlap. Their overlapping made connecting and disconnecting the signal connector very difficult.

Unfortunately, we won’t be able to order these PCBs until our parts for them have arrived. I don’t know for sure that my footprints of the 3-pin XT30 connectors are good, so I need to test them before we commit on this new ESC PCB design.

I also began building JONA’s second Tube Camera.

SLA Printing on Aaron BenDaniel's Blog

Junior Week 16

Junior Week 14