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

[Dyne]

This is what LD-F1 looks like now:


I think changing to a static neck was an excellent decision.  The new neck feels pretty solid and stable so far, and I do like the addition of the aluminum tube.  The neck also no longer has a vertical seam down the center of the parts, and being able to just open the rear body to install the battery without having to hold the lower stalks up makes that process a lot easier.

Thanks to the neck being detachable from the body, reattaching the head is also a lot easier than it used to be ... aside from one screw that was difficult to correctly align with the brass insert.  Eventually I got it, though.


Post-reassembly testing went alright.  

He drives at least as well as he did before, possibly a little better.  I'm implementing a small amount of deadband on my radio sticks by setting up curves in the radio's model.  That will make it a little easier to (for example) drive straight rather than drifting to one side or another when the stick is slightly off axis, or look up/down without tilting the head at the same time (to the extent the servos behave themselves).

I mention behaving themselves because the head animatronics are working more or less like they did before. In other words, they still tend to jerk into place if you move the controls too fast, which I suspect is more an issue with the servos and the lack of proper smoothing than anything.  Also, when (for example) looking up/down, both servos are supposed to move together, but one servo will still sometimes respond noticeably later than the other. Unsure if that's a power draw issue or what.

I have, however, tightened up the slop in the rotation gearing by moving the servo's mounting point 1 mm closer to the neck on the rotation platform, and I also printed the new platform part solid, so the head shouldn't be able to skip teeth and lose centering anymore.  That said, I did have to add a bunch of subtrim to get it centered when the potentiometer is centered, so I think my gear is slightly offset in tooth position. I had it centered via servo tester but I needed to take the gear off tge servo horn to fix something during reassembly, so I may have put it back on rotated. I'll need to fix that before the end of the month.

The split loom on the servo wires up into the head causes the wire bundle to curve forward relative to the neck, which I'm not sure I like.  The loom also sometimes gets caught on the body shell without leaving enough slack to allow free head movement.  I might remove the split loom and go back to free wires, which is closer to the art anyway.

The ESP32 seems to no longer randomly reboot, but it still sometimes fails to power up in the first place (maybe the sketch is crashing at boot or something, not sure).

I ran into one further problem that I'll need to address.  Randomly, the droid started producing a buzzing noise.  The source turned out to be that servo that I left in the head for future use with the top door mechanism.  Somehow, the receiver triggered that channel into running continuously, likely running the servo into its end stops and/or running the servo horn into the inside of the head, and probably stripping the gearbox.  Either way, it spontaneously starts buzzing constantly and heating up so I've now disconnected it.