Painting Skins & Weathering

Today I finished painting the front skins and most of the back. I didn't want to wait too long before weathering, partially because I didn't want to get used to him clean and partially because I needed something else to do.

I approached this new step the only way I know how. As a miniature painter. I got out the Citadel Paints from my cabinet and proceeded to mix inks until I had an acceptable color (at least IMO). Then I got out a small brush and started to work, edging various areas and wiping excess off with a wet rag.

I was surprisingly excited to go through this process and was having a great time at it until my youngest daughter told me that I ruined R2 and it looked terrible. After that, every stroke of paint weighed heavy on my heart and I considered returning to the garage to start spraying white all over again.









There's the picture of the finished product (click for larger version). You can see that in some areas, even though the parts are not sticking through the skins, I tried to paint as if they were and get the proper drips.

Any feedback on this paint job would be welcome. Tell me it sucks so I can go back and fix it now, or tell me you like it so I don't continue to second guess myself.

WonderCon 2010 Day 2

Today we started off the day with our Droid Builders Panel at 1:30. I had an interesting time getting R2 loaded and unloaded because of the rain. I had to put a trash bag on him to keep him dry.

Despite it being Easter Sunday we still had a full room and the presentation went well. Thanks go to Matt McCormick for doing the slide presentation and MCing the event.

Droid Panelists, Matt, Chris and myself.














As usual, R2 had his share of fans come out. This little guy was in awe, but he was afraid to stand beside R2 for a picture. The next little girl was R2's greatest fan. She frolicked around him, touched his dome a lot and even rolled around on the floor behind him. After following us for quite a while he parents decided it was time to head another direction.








































Because the Sunday crowd was a little more sparse than Saturday, I was able to take R2 through the main exhibit hall and run him up and down the isles. He stopped at several booths and took pictures with people.

The Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal guys were the best and drew this robot for R2.


























Finally, what would convention be like without Star Trek? R2 and I stopped off for a little cross over blasphemy. Warp Speed Mr. Sulu!

WonderCon 2010 Day 1

Well, R2-XS made it through day one with no major problems. At the beginning of the day his dome wasn't responding well and he had a short in the dome lights but I got him up and running quickly.

There were some new builders that stopped in this year. Matt McCormic was the newest to bring a droid. If you haven't seen his wood and styrene droid, you should. Its a weathered work of art.

Here are a few pics from my flickr:

R2-XS is Back!



























We did a few interviews including this one with Fox news and one with Verizon's Droid team.



























Mutual awe. The kids love R2 and can't believe their eyes when he rolls up. Equally R2 can't imagine the craftsmanship that goes into each little child.



























Its a trap! Your mouth can't repel taste of that magnitude! I couldn't resist this pic when one of the guys showed up as Admiral Ackbar with the cereal in his hand.

Getting Ready for WonderCon

So much has happened in the last few weeks that has enabled me to do WonderCon with XS. Here is the simple breakdown:

After a year of electrical frustrations and XS being renamed "Twitch" I had all but given up on getting him fixed. I even replaced everything and still had the problem. I took him in his humbled state to the R2 Builders gathering in Davis and let the guys take a look at him, but most were baffled by the issue. Gerard tried his hand at debugging to no avail, but after we reconstructed all the wiring from square one he just suddenly worked again. Thanks "Droid Whisperer"!

Since that day I have been working hard to get my skins on and install all the various bits that were laying around. I suffered a lot of setbacks including holes that were stripped and screws breaking off in them. Also, due to all the bad weather, I wasn't able to paint everything. Either way I did get him together and we are ready to roll.

I have to finish up this post with thanks to a few people who helped me in my time of need.

First to my neighbor who let me use his Dremel tool. Mine went missing after working on sets for theatre.

Second, thanks my friend Justin from K-119 in San Bruno for hooking me up with some great tools (one I didn't even know existed) and saving me a lot of money.

Also to my friend Ron from Revive Customs auto shop for letting me borrow stuff from his shop. This is my second big thanks to him. He was the one who volunteered to bondo my crappy legs.

I would have posted pictures but I don't want to put out any spoilers before tomorrow's con. See you there.

Wired Magazine Interview

This weekend the R2 Builders group had a great presence at Maker Faire. The usual suspects from the Bay Area builders added a new droid made by Grant Mckinney and were joined by Guy Vardaman, Chris Ellerby from SoCal.

On Saturday our members were interviewed for G4TV's Attack of the Show, and for Wired Magazine. There was also a photo shoot for Make Magazine's upcoming robot issue.

Here is the Wired Interview.

Chris has a lot of pics on Flickr.

Afternoon at the Ranch

Yesterday afternoon Gerard and I took his R2 up to the Ranch where the Clone Wars cartoon is created. Dave Filoni was being given honors from his Alma Mater via video conference and wanted to add a little Star Wars magic to his acceptance speech.



The site was beautiful with a large lake and rolling hills. The interior walls were decorated with George's classic movie poster collection and original art from the star wars universe. It was an amazing place to visit and seemed more of a mountain vacation spot than an office.

While we were there, Dave also decided to use R2 to announce the season finale ratings in the Friday staff meeting. We stashed the droid behind a curtain until Dave went up to make his presentation. R2 drove out and surprised everyone, had some dialogue with Dave which he announced to the group. Clone Wars beat out Battle Star Galactica by a wide margin which means that it also beat everything else on TV that night.

When all of the events were done, we went down to the building entrance and had a photo op with the show's production crew.



Naturally R2 got lots of love while he was there.



Big thanks to Megan for taking care of us while we were on site and thanks to Dave Filoni and the team for being a very laid back welcoming group.



Additional pictures can be found on my flickr page.

Covered on the Make Blog

XS was featured on the Make Blog after they saw Bonnie's post on Star Wars blog.

R2-XS on Make Blog

Rear Logic Soldering

I have begun soldering my own Rear Logics primarily to keep costs down, but its pretty hectic trying to emulate the 8 circuits on a project board.

Here is a pic of the first 5 rows soldered in place.













Here is a pic of whats going on on the reverse side.













The crossing and soldering of these wires to create the circuits has become a nightmare. Every row I complete leaves a greater mass of wires that end up covering leads where other wires need to be soldered.

When I started I was under no illusion about how difficult this could be, but I'm concerned that I will get done or half way done only to find that there was something else/better that I should have been doing. I really don't want to get to the end to find out that they don't work.

If anyone out there has any advice on how to do this better please let me know. I'm very interested in lessons learned by someone else who has been down this road.

*EDIT* Since the posting of this entry several people have given me help on sorting this mess out. I have since removed the wiring and started over. More to come in future posts. */EDIT*

Rear Logics

Now that WonderCon is behind us, its time to set new goals and press forward with new things.

Previously all the goals were set based giving XS basic functionality. Now I'm back to figuring out what I can accomplish that will show the most change with the least amount of money.

I decided to start by wiring my own logics using Leon's layouts on project boards, but not without a few snags.

I started by trying to match a project board up to my logis to see if everything would fit. After looking a this pic on Chris James blog: Rear Logic Electronics it was apparent to me that the board had to be twisted 45deg to fit. So I gave it a shot and my board came up 6mm too wide, leaving 2 LED's off of each row.

Maybe someone out there can help me out with this, but I don't know if the problem is with the hole spacing on my board or if the rear logic surround needs to be filed out 6mm. Do project boards come with different hole spacing? I sure don't want to file down Dave Shaw's fine work on the surrounds. Actually if it comes to that, then I'll just go with rows of 4x25 rather than being screen accurate.

WonderCon 2009

WonderCon this year was a blast! Friday afternoon Chris and I went to get our pro badges for the team and looked around the hall a bit. After we had seen everything we wanted to, we headed over to the 501st/Rebel Legion Dinner.

The dinner was well attended with people from LFL, especially staff of the Clone Wars series. Mary Franklin and Steve Sansweet were among the crew as well as Dave Filoni, Matt Wood and Daniel Logan.

On Saturday we showed up at 8:00 so that we could get the droids unloaded but were turned away at the curb. Chris and I unloaded across the street while Tiny (from AZ) and Gerard went to the parking garage and drove their droids over.

The morning went well entertaining the crowds. We were asked a few times to move further from the entrance because the flow of traffic stopped when they saw our droids.

Our Droid Building Basics panel with Don Bies was at 12:30 and went far better than I had imagined. The room was packed and a lot of people turned away because they couldn't even see in. The whole session was lively and had some great questions as well as some humor to keep us from geeking out too completely.














Bonnie Burton from StarWars Blog and Terri Hodges were around on Friday and Saturday enjoying the con and taking pictures. We spent some time talking and they gave the droids some love.














Of course XS was a hit with kids and adults alike, but I especially love pics like this one below.



Throughout the day there were quite a few interviews for the droids. The pic below was a crew from a Canadian TV station, but we were also featured on G4 TV and had numerous write ups, in the SF Chronicle, 1up.com and KPBS. There are even a few MySpace and YouTube Videos.

KBPS.org Article
Quick Quote in the Chronicle
1up.com Blog
MySpace Video
Edit: Official Star Wars Blog



Of course the day wouldn't have been the same without my Padawan (shown in the interview pic) and my Jawa who worked hard the week before the con to get their costumes together.

They added some nice atmosphere to the droids and with the help of XS won the LFL costume award at the masquerade.




On a technical note, XS did a 14 hour day on the Optima Battery without a recharge. He took two 20 min breaks to recharge the Zune which gave us an initial 7 hrs and I replaced the RC battery when it started complaining loudly at the 12 hour mark.

Special thanks for a great day go out to Chris James, Tiny, Gerard and Don Bies.

Now get ready for Maker Faire SF!

More Pics can be found on my FLickr Page as well as Chris James' and the Star Wars Blog's.

Last Test Drive

Today R2-XS was tested by taking a trip to 4th Grade Science Class. The kids loved him and he performed extremely well on the door jams and carpet in the school entry.

Afterward Chris and I did some last minute tuning. Chris took this video before he was loaded into the van for WonderCon.



Hopefully the next post will be about how awesome he performed at the convention.

Until then, I have work to do on my friend's Jawa costume, so that he can accompany us on Saturday.

Caster Cleaning

My other item for today's work was to degrease and clean the bearings in my casters and grease them up again. After the first day out they had been dragging and sticking.

I soaked the casters in an inch of Simple Green. After 20 min the tub had a layer of silt and chunks in the bottom. After drying everything off I put fresh grease back in and figured I was done.

Once I had everything assembled again I noticed that things didn't go back exactly the way they came out. My rear caster was now rubbing the sides in two spots. I had to take everything out again and deepen the cuts in the foot shell before calling the job done.

Thankfully XS is now turning smooth.

Optima Battery Mounting

Today I set out to mount the Optima Blue Top battery in XS. My current wiring is designed to use 2 batteries, one for the electronics and the other for the foot motors. The primary reason was that the AX3500 Speed Controller cuts the foot motors if the battery drops below 10V causing the droid to jitter across the floor. By having its own battery it never knows when the primary battery is low so things stay smooth.

Of course all of that changes when you go to one large battery. The Optima should give me 8hrs or so of drive time without getting the jitters. Either way there is no room to put another battery.

So my goal was to make my system able to handle both my 18ah batteries and the Optima with the least amount of work if switching on the fly.

First thing I did was remove the plugs I had installed on my other batteries and wired screwed them together with the post from the big battery. I also wrapped the joint in electrical tape to prevent any potential disasters.













Next I removed my battery harness and strapped the Optima in with cargo straps. I put the hooks around the spacers holding the skirt on and criss-crossed them over the battery.













Once that was done I was able to put the post connections back on and plug both systems into the battery at the same time. With that done XS was running smooth. The battery slowed him down a little but not too bad.













As for making it an easy transition to the other batteries, I think I failed. If I start a day with the Optima in place, I can transition to the other batteries, but it would take about 10 minutes of screwing in the battery harness and putting the terminal plugs back.

Recycled Bits

I thought it would be fun to catalog all of the random items that I have "recycled" from other places to create cheap or quick solutions for R2. Below is the current list of odd items.

Clear plastic, Washington Apples carton from CostCo, painted up becomes a nicely shaped Radar Eye. Unfortunately, if poked too hard its done for.













Milk jug cut and layered to make PSI lenses. Mike Velcheck's PSI's are so bright that I have 2 layers of milk jug hot glued together for one lense, and a third layer further up in the PVC tube.













I needed a quick, temporary fix for my lack of Logic LED's. These are a temporary WIP, made from Light Saber packaging. I have blue for the front.













My Zune dock need to connect to the amp via its Audio/Video cable, so I desoldered this one from a cable box.













The USB port, Headphone Jack and Speakers below were taken from an old PC, along with a number of connectors for various uses.









































Last but not least, I needed something to keep the slip ring wires from falling into the dome drive motor. A quick scan of the garage revealed a slip 'n slide that my daughter had recently destroyed. I took the liberty of relieving it of this tube, which has done the job well.

Shaky Legs

One of the problems that I ran into during my test outing Tuesday was that the legs had worked loose and would fold forward during acceleration causing the wheels to slip or the front casters to bind up.

I tried to tighten the bolts by hand to no avail. I took advice given and put a hex like tip in a ratchet, which I quickly broke (leaving about 1.5" of broken tool down in the leg).

I found myself wishing I had an aluminum plate to make some sort of bracket, but since that wasn't an option, I resorted to more creative means.

I reached for the trusty cutting board used for the foot wedges and created inserts for the inside of the frame where the 2-3-2 motion would be (pictured below).













With the cutting board inserts in place, there is very little play in the legs and now R2 does a little wheely when he accelerates fast.

Fresh Batteries

After the game yesterday, when R2 was limping to the car one of the Dads told me he had a battery that came with his trailer that he didn't need and he offered it to me. He said it was a blue top and that it was 55Ah.

I wasn't sure if he was really serious, but tonight he brought it and dropped it off.

Its an Optima 8016-103 D34M BlueTop Dual Purpose Battery which retails around $200.












With a battery like this I should be able to drive R2 all day without a recharge. The only catch is that it weighs 43lbs and its larger than the ankle base plate in some dimensions. To use it I will have to remove my battery harness and come up with some other way to secure this thing.

Ironically, the long lost batteries that Chris and I ordered on line, showed up last night too. At least I wont have to order a second set.

1st Outing

Today XS made his way to our grade school campus for a test on carpet, then to the High School for a few hours before heading to the Girls B-Ball playoffs.

The carpet was a little too thick and killed his batteries fast so as soon as I got him to the high school I started charging him in the hall.


















Everyone enjoyed seeing him and there were lots of pics taken. Even the teachers were ok with the loud interruption.



































We got him charged and loaded in time to make the game, which our team won. I think it was because R2 was there to cheer for them. I did find myself wishing he made a sound something like, "What are you BLIND, REF?"













In the end R2 got his pic with the victorious Lady Falcons.

edit: I had some issues with my center foot. Now that its been used and loosened up, I need to at some wedges to keep it from tipping when I turn or accelerate.

R2-XS v1.0 Complete

With 1 Week and 3 Days left to go before WonderCon XS has reached the goal of being ready. This is just version 1.0 and he has a little tweaking that has to be done to the speed controller settings, but there is nothing left to construct or add for this version.

My kids squealed with delight, jumped up and down and even hugged him. Their response was better than Christmas morning.


















Tomorrow I will attempt taking him to the school for some road tests. If it works out, I will get some pics to post.

Peace.

Sound System

Getting ready for WonderCon I needed sound in XS. Since I couldnt afford a CF III Reader yet, I went the cheaper route. I spent a few $ on a single channel amp and wired it to my Zune.

I'm using the Zune Dock v1.0 which is powered with a USB cord and has an audio/video output cable on it.

In the picture below you can see the USB plugged in to a 5v adapter that I soldered on a project board. The Zune is placed in the dock which is then connected to the audio/video input that I pillaged from an old cable box.

The Audio/Video input is connected to the 20W amp through a connector taken out of an old PC.













There are no speakers in the picture, but they are mounted in the droid. I had 2 HP speakers from an old PC. They ran off of a headphone jack, so I pillaged a headphone input from that same poor old PC and connected it via the same connector as the audio in.


















Here you can see the Zune situated in the back of R2. All of the sounds I have are put into an Album and set to shuffle. The infrared remote from the dock is used to pause and play the random sounds.

Eventually, when I get the CF III system, I plan to put the Zune dock elsewhere in the droid with a mixer connecting the 2 systems. That way, all of the sounds can be played remotely through the CF reader and the Zune can be used to play music, simultaneously.

Hello World.

Last night Chris came over and we worked together till 11:30 getting the electronics taken care of in XS. When he left we had the dome motor rotating and things were getting pretty close to done on the drive system.

Tonight I finished that wiring, chanced the AX3500 settings to mixed channels and then tested the system by laying the legs next to the frame and hooking them up. Since everything was in order, I mounted the legs and gave R2 his first spin around the garage.

I don't have video but here are a few pics.

His dome is mostly done, I have to tape on the pie panels since I wont have hinges installed for the convention. I also have to finish wiring the slip ring so that the PSI's will be working.


















Here is the view of the back panel. I'm sure it looks familiar to many of you since I am using Chris' spare VEX until I can acquire my own.


















I'd like to take this moment to thank Chris James for bringing me into this club and helping me along the way and Jerry Green (JAG) for being a huge help in getting may parts. If it wasn't for those guys I would just be a parts collector, and not a very good one at that.

Peace.