Saturday 29 May 2010

Post machineing nearly complete.

Nearly all of the post machining on the Aluminium leg parts is now complete, the next thing to do is send parts back to Link engineering for hole boring, and then off to the anodizers. We are anodizing the parts silver, I hope the etch will bring them back to a uniform colour, although I have my doubts they will all look the same after are waterjet friends clearly used different stock for the job!!

Friday 28 May 2010

Testing the coxa assembly

The coxa assembly is going together well considering the amount of issues we had wit the waterjet cutting! Although Josh has had to keep a careful eye on the varying material thickness to get a good fit.

Wednesday 19 May 2010

A new foot.

Nice to see our foot design in aluminium instead of our mock MDF version :)

Lots and lots of machining..

Josh and I set to the post machining on the waterjet cut parts today, there is loads to do, especially as the waterjet cutter decided it could no longer cut round holes smaller than 5mm, so these have all been piloted by the machine which means we have to open them out to the required size.

I set to work on the foot plates, these need quit alot of material removed which takes quite a long time with a 6mm cuter on my pacer, but once it is set up it only needs checking on occasionally and it does the job!

Saturday 15 May 2010

Chassis fine adjustments..

While stood admiring our chassis, Josh noticed the front two coxa axis were slightly lozenged! We worked out they were adrift by approximately one degree, so time to break out the grinder and 8 tonne crane jack for a fine adjustment.

Our chassis gets wheels, temporarily!

We have added scaffold clamps to the inside of our chassis so that we can wheel it around while we are working on it, and of course as a safety feature if we need to work under it! Also re-arranged the workshop so we can wheel it to the back and still get the CNC trailer in at night.

Thursday 13 May 2010

Josh tries out the driving position.

The Chassis Arrives!

Dave from Phoenix delivered our chassis this afternoon, for some reason it seems smaller than both Josh and I imagined, probably because it is missing the legs!

Dave admires his handy work.

Wednesday 12 May 2010

Solenoid Counterbalance Valves

The rest of our Sun Hydraulics order arrived! These manifolds have a solenoid valve inserted at one end, and would usually have pilot operated check valves on A and B which are piloted from the operation of the solenoid. We have replaced the pilot check valves with 5:1 counterbalance valves, so in normal operation the counterbalance valves should be help open by the pilot lone from the solenoid. When the solenoid is off, they should act as pressure relief valves to the rams.

Tuesday 11 May 2010

Operator Interface Chair

The second control was completed today and fitted to the operator chair. Very please with the look and feel of the operator interface. The plan is to fit the operator touch screen to the right control box. We may have to add additional support to the arm rest in order to stiffen the structure.

Operator Present Hack

In order to add the operator present indication to the P&G JC400 joysticks, I had to hack a sensor capacitive touch sensor onto the joystick. To do this I added a brass ring around the top of the grip, and using one of the unused Z axis wires, connected this to a sensor PCB inside the control box. I also tied a PCB sensor on the top of the grip, however, this interfered with the fir of the rubber grip cover, so I reverted to a few coils of wire on the top which also connect the brass ring to the sensor PCB.

Monday 10 May 2010

Operator Interface Controls

I have finished the master control for the operator interface, Josh made a bracket to fix the control box to the arm rests on the operator chair, adjustable via T nuts. The controls feel good, and I hope will be fairly intuitive. I also added a capacitive touch sensor into the top of the joystick that will work as the operator present signal.

Thursday 6 May 2010

Ankle joint sensor


Just finished installing and wiring up the 16 switches that make up our ankle joint angle sensor, a fiddly job! I have wired all the switches in parallel for now, so that we get a contact when the ball joint is at its limit.

Wednesday 5 May 2010

Leg welding is nearly finished

Our welded leg sections are coming together nicely at Dave's workshop. He has them all tacked in place, ready for final welding, along with grinding back the outer and inner welds for a smooth surface.

We have moved him on to the chassis so that we can get it back to our workshop and start to figure out where everything goes!