I don’t need to explain what is going on here do I? No I didn’t think so. But for context, I’ve been having trouble closing the bedroom window. I imagined it was something in the mechanism was stuffing up. Finally I got sick of it and pulled the winder off. […]

On our way back from Perth, Chris asked me about 3D printers. I haven’t kept up on the 3D printer market, but he said he wanted to try and make some historical Cornish fishing vessels for his railway modelling. My existing 3D printer is a clone of the Makerbot 2 […]

For a while, Chris has been worried about lithium ion batteries suddenly going up in smoke and setting fire to everything. Now, the risk is real but there’s probably not a lot we can do about it since there are so many items in the house with Li Ion batteries, […]

I fixed the problem with the motor wiring harness on Spot X by physically reordering the pins in the cable. Did I get it right. Well, no of course not. I flipped Spot X onto its back, pulled off the connectors, battled with the pins for 5 minutes, plugged them […]

I’ve done a bit more work on Spot X 1.0. I pulled it to pieces and drilled some holes in the decks to allow me to fit the new electronics I also drilled some access holes in the side of the motor assemblies so that I can run sensor wires […]

I haven’t had a chance to test the software modifications in Spot X yet, because both of the robots are in pieces, but testing on the bench seems to show that the higher motor speeds are in fact better for the controller. I took the chance to add in acceleration […]

While I wait for my lunch to defrost I’ll type this. For the last couple of days I’ve been getting close to my wits’ end with these motor driver boards. No matter what I tried I couldn’t get them to run without overheating. I was certain that this wasn’t a […]