Dyne's LD-F1 (D-O concept) build

[Dyne]

Now that I'm back from Dragon Con and things are starting to return to what passes for normal, I thought I'd post an update.  I've already described much of his performance at the con, so I won't rehash that, but I will post some media, and also go over the improvements I know I need to make.

You may recall LD-F1's speed controllers were dangling out of the body.  I didn't have time to fix that, but we did redecorate them a bit before the convention...



This was the gang once we arrived at the hotel on Thursday.  Chewchilla the Wookiee Monster (who is meant to go with Artie Deco, but I didn't have him this year), Babu Frik, LD-F1, and 99-99:



I drove him around the droid dome quite a bit.  Here's a little video of LD-F1 practicing his head tilts.





And a still image:



The silver pulley on the left is the one that was broken when the inner belt came off, shown next to the intact spare.  I'm more surprised that this didn't happen multiple times:



And this is the damage that was done to the mounting post in that incident, with the belt chainsawing its way into the plastic:



Spare belt and pulley installed.  This fix lasted the rest of the convention:



The belt on the other side, however, did not.  This is the one that broke right before the droid builder's panel. Since I'd already used the spare belt, I had no way to fix this and mostly just moved him around by hand or let him sit in place and animated his head:



Group photo of the droids after the panel:




I used the Bluetooth speaker running audio from the Human-Cyborg Relations' Astromech app on my spare phone, but only occasionally during the day when there were periods where it was quiet enough to hear the speaker.  In the evenings, the con was far too noisy to hear it even at full volume, unless you got right next to it.


As for improvements:

* LD-F1's head needs the front orange stripe painted on and just general weathering all over the droid.

* I only need three fuses, so I'm going to be taking the 6 position fuse panel out and rewiring in favor of individual blade fuse holders, as the space will be needed for putting those ESCs under the electronics cover properly.   I will probably make more use of Wago connectors

* I also need to find a home for the R/C receiver.

* Head internal wiring needs to be neatened.  I suspect it was sometimes catching on the mechanism.  Didn't have time or energy to deal with that before or during the con.

* The ESP32 rebooting issue needs to be investigated.  You can tell this is happening because his neopixels go yellow, then slowly fill with blue (the startup sequence).  Also, occasionally, I will switch on the power and the neopixels do not come on at all.  Unsure what's going on there.

* Belt tension needs to be improved.

* Need to tighten the starboard head tilt servo horn.

* I always intended that the wiring running up to his head should be in a wire loom of some sort, I just needed something more like 1/2" rather than the 3/8" and larger that I had available.  In the mean time, the current setup works.

* I'm probably going to shorten his antenna a little.

* I'll be printing the side plates for his tracks soon hopefully.

* I want to tighten up the neck mechanism so it has less play, side-to-side.

* His head rotation also keeps losing its centering, so he can often turn his head further one way than the other.  I'll probably need to tighten up the yaw servo mount.


All in all, it was a pretty good convention in spite of the malfunctions.  LD-F1 appears to be pretty popular, with several people saying they loved it (including, reportedly, Michael McMaster).  Kids at the convention also liked to crowd around him, and one little girl even gave him a flower.