Dyne's MSE-4

[Dyne]

OK, let's catch up...

The styrene and foam body was puttied up after the last post, but I wasn't happy with the way it was sanding (poor fit on the foam corners) or how well the skins were attached, and I still needed to do the same thing on the bottom. Due to a rapidly approaching con deadline, I have therefore decided to forego further construction on my styrene and foam core MSE-4 body, in favor of printing the Thingiverse model that Ian Whitehouse designed for the Blomiky car.  

The main reason that I didn't go the printed route in the first place (besides the desire to do it myself, and in particular the desire to decorate it in my own particular way) is because my printer has a mildly warped Y carriage, which makes it difficult to get the bed level across a large area. This causes adhesion issues on larger prints.  I ran into this issue when I originally attempted to print the thing.

However,  I have recently gotten my printer to a much better state of level.  (I had to, in order to print the cap of my BB unit's dome in one piece.)  As a result, printing the mouse body was finally possible.

I still didn't want the integrated decorations, however, so I remixed the upper body to remove them.  I also modified the lower body to facilitate adding my rectangular LED in the trench.  I finished printing both portions of this remixed body over the weekend.

Unfortunately, just as I was about to start printing the mounts for my intended side circuit boards, my printer started behaving in a concerning way.  It makes me think the wires to the thermal sensor are about to fail.  I don't want to risk using it until I have more time to diagnose the problem, as a sensor failure could cause a thermal runaway.  I'll have to fabricate mounts and other details with other materials.


In any case, here is the car with the bottom part of the body attached.  You can see where the LED will be mounted in the front trench:



My plan for the circuit board on one side of the MSE-4 has always been to use a quad relay board that I got from AliExpress ahile back.  It arrived in a rather squashed and broken state, but I kept it to use for exactly this sort of thing.  I plan to attach it with magnets (that's why I needed to print a mount) so that I can swap it out for something else.  As you can see, I've also painted my mouse droid Navy Blue (not every mouse needs to be Imperial Black).  I still need to do something about the green trim around the wheels.



That was the only busted relay board I had.  On the opposite side of the droid, I have instead elected to use the dome mainboard from the same Spin Master BB-8 droid that served as the donor for my BB-5M project.  This board appeared to be nonfunctional the last time I tested it.




I wasn't initially planning to have audio in this thing at all.  I have joked that when asked about the silence of the droid, I would claim that its small size put its sounds beyond the range of human hearing.

However, I ended up having to get a bluetooth speaker for BB-5M when all my prior audio options failed.  I can also use that speaker in this droid, simply by moving it from one to the other and loading up a different sound board.  I have been going through and pitching up the sounds in a mouse droid loop, to represent the MSE-4's smaller size.