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I'm still at Dragon Con, so this is just a quick update. Photos will have to wait.
LD-F1 has been running every day.
Thursday was the roughest. I managed to drive out of the room, down to the Atrium Level, and over to the droid area (which took all of five minutes) before his belts started slipping. It took awhile for the pads to wear off enough rough edges to be able to turn reliably on the droid dome's carpet.
That issue wasn't nearly as bad as when he later made a trip to the food court and I made extensive use of that high speed mode I didnt think I'd need.
Remember (in post #41) when I said I discovered that one of the outer toothed wheels had come off when I installed the second track, so I replaced all the outer M3 screws with longer ones?
I didn't replace the inner screws after that because I couldn't access them without taking the track and sprocketsback off. Putting the tracks on single-handedly was enough of a pain that I was willing to not bother unless it actually came up, hopefully at a point when I was more likely to have assistance.
It came up during that trip to the food court.
The belt started skipping badly, and one track eventually stopped turning. I checked it and I thought it was a loose pulley, but (once the track was off) it turned out that the front starboard inner wheel came free. Since the toothed wheels also keep the bearings on the sprocket, and therefore keep everything centered on the axle, so the whole sprocket goes off kilter when this happens.
The inner belt on the port side also came off during the trip (or during my attempts to get it driving). Getting to that belt back on also required removing the other track, so I replaced the screws on all four sprockets while I could get to them.
Once I had both tracks off, I discovered the port belt had not only sheared the inner flange off of the intermediate pulley (not too surprising, as it's thin in that area) but also chainsawed its way into the pulley's mounting post on the front outer side plate. Without a spare plate, my only option was to replace the pulley with my only (PLA) spare and cross my fingers.
On Friday, the droid was driving much better, even on the carpet. The only time he had trouble was during our droid parade through the Atrium. He got halfway around the first leg before the constant starting and stopping to navigate the crowd caused one of the outer belts to come off. That's a relatively trivial fix, and he managed to drive the rest of the night with only minor belt skipping when I went too fast.
His starboard head servo horn also started coming off. I can temporarily press fit it back on temporarily, but don't have the tiny tiny allen key that's needed to tighten it with me.
Finally, the microcontroller started periodically rebooting (especially when tilting full forward), which only affects the face LEDs ... you can tell because they all go yellow then return to blue. I suspect a loose wire or the foam behind the ESP32 hitting the button. Not a big deal.
Things went even more smoothly Saturday, with only the minor recurring issues from the day before. He played to the crowd and interacted with the other droids a lot. He even gained his own (toy) insect companion and pretended to be a mini WALL-E for awhile.
I've often found younger kids gravitate toward the smaller robots (probably because they are less intimidating), and adults because they seem cuter. This one has not been an exception.
Given how things have gone once we got through the first day, I'm pretty pleased. There are definite areas for improvement, but for awhile there I feared the drive would destroy itself.
We'll see how the rest of the con goes.
Edit: The droid ran until just before the droid builder's panel Sunday night, at which point the starboard inner belt broke, and since the only one I had left was the deformed version from the food court aftermath, that put a stop to my driving activities (at least in any direction other than straight forward and back and sometimes random right turns). I'm still quite pleased with his performance.
LD-F1 has been running every day.
Thursday was the roughest. I managed to drive out of the room, down to the Atrium Level, and over to the droid area (which took all of five minutes) before his belts started slipping. It took awhile for the pads to wear off enough rough edges to be able to turn reliably on the droid dome's carpet.
That issue wasn't nearly as bad as when he later made a trip to the food court and I made extensive use of that high speed mode I didnt think I'd need.
Remember (in post #41) when I said I discovered that one of the outer toothed wheels had come off when I installed the second track, so I replaced all the outer M3 screws with longer ones?
I didn't replace the inner screws after that because I couldn't access them without taking the track and sprocketsback off. Putting the tracks on single-handedly was enough of a pain that I was willing to not bother unless it actually came up, hopefully at a point when I was more likely to have assistance.
It came up during that trip to the food court.
The belt started skipping badly, and one track eventually stopped turning. I checked it and I thought it was a loose pulley, but (once the track was off) it turned out that the front starboard inner wheel came free. Since the toothed wheels also keep the bearings on the sprocket, and therefore keep everything centered on the axle, so the whole sprocket goes off kilter when this happens.
The inner belt on the port side also came off during the trip (or during my attempts to get it driving). Getting to that belt back on also required removing the other track, so I replaced the screws on all four sprockets while I could get to them.
Once I had both tracks off, I discovered the port belt had not only sheared the inner flange off of the intermediate pulley (not too surprising, as it's thin in that area) but also chainsawed its way into the pulley's mounting post on the front outer side plate. Without a spare plate, my only option was to replace the pulley with my only (PLA) spare and cross my fingers.
On Friday, the droid was driving much better, even on the carpet. The only time he had trouble was during our droid parade through the Atrium. He got halfway around the first leg before the constant starting and stopping to navigate the crowd caused one of the outer belts to come off. That's a relatively trivial fix, and he managed to drive the rest of the night with only minor belt skipping when I went too fast.
His starboard head servo horn also started coming off. I can temporarily press fit it back on temporarily, but don't have the tiny tiny allen key that's needed to tighten it with me.
Finally, the microcontroller started periodically rebooting (especially when tilting full forward), which only affects the face LEDs ... you can tell because they all go yellow then return to blue. I suspect a loose wire or the foam behind the ESP32 hitting the button. Not a big deal.
Things went even more smoothly Saturday, with only the minor recurring issues from the day before. He played to the crowd and interacted with the other droids a lot. He even gained his own (toy) insect companion and pretended to be a mini WALL-E for awhile.
I've often found younger kids gravitate toward the smaller robots (probably because they are less intimidating), and adults because they seem cuter. This one has not been an exception.
Given how things have gone once we got through the first day, I'm pretty pleased. There are definite areas for improvement, but for awhile there I feared the drive would destroy itself.
We'll see how the rest of the con goes.
Edit: The droid ran until just before the droid builder's panel Sunday night, at which point the starboard inner belt broke, and since the only one I had left was the deformed version from the food court aftermath, that put a stop to my driving activities (at least in any direction other than straight forward and back and sometimes random right turns). I'm still quite pleased with his performance.