Alt-BEAM Archive

Message #12974



To: alt-beam@egroups.com
From: David Simmons devs@idirect.com
Date: Mon, 03 Apr 2000 20:37:40 -0700
Subject: Re: [alt-beam] Re: Almost Complete Walker


William,

Parental financial backing is apart of it, but spending several hours a
week in salvage is also a big part of it. Kyle works really hard to find
useful parts anyway he can and as cheap as possible. For instance he
found a box full of broken motion sensors a few weeks ago in one the
surplus stores. He paid 5 buck for a dozen. That is a dozen 0.047 5.5v
caps for real cheap. Plus the cases he uses for frames, heads, or
anything that comes along. Always know what you are looking for, and
also know a deal (even if you don't need the parts at this very moment).
Kyle has several bins of junk to take apart in a closet, plus shoe boxes
full of sorted parts. As he has time he sorts, desolders, as so.

Regards,
Dave

William Cox wrote:
>
> Kewl. The little fella sure is doing better than me (maybe because of
> parental financial backing :) Did you use servos with the electronics
> gutted?
> -William
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: David Simmons
> To:
> Cc:
> Sent: Sunday, April 02, 2000 8:26 PM
> Subject: Almost Complete Walker
>
> > Hey All,
> >
> > Almost complete walker complete, almost.
> >
> > I mentioned last week that Kyle (9 going on ten for those that don't
> > know) had started to breadboard the almost compete walker circuit of
> > Beam Online fame. I expected several failures the first time round due
> > to the pure number of connections. Consider, the addition of the two
> > H-Bridges, and LEDs to indicate gait. However he made only one mistake,
> > missing a pin with one of the .22uf caps, which didn't long for him to
> > debug.
> >
> > The same day he started to layout the circuit on pref. board, was nearly
> > complete when he had to put it to the side for a few days. The week was
> > nuts so he wasn't able to get back to the project until yesterday.
> > Yesterday he completed the pref. board and the frame work and hooked it
> > all up with jumpers. At that moment he was ready failure, or at least
> > major problems. At first it just wiggled around in one spot, with a
> > quick flip of the connections for the back servo and it started to walk
> > across the table. He tested the reverse, and the started to finish off
> > the body etc.
> >
> > Today he was busy right from the morning to get everything just the way
> > he wanted it so it will ready to show off to a few friends, grandparents
> > and so on. Making the tactile sensor, mounting it, mounting the battery
> > pack and so on.
> >
> > For the entire project my involvement was limited to a little dremel
> > work, and paying for the parts. This one he wanted to do all on his own.
> >
> > O.K. the proud Dad part is over.
> >
> > There is some work left to be done, he plans on making some better legs
> > once he finds a better way to mount to the servos and gluing down the
> > power switch. Just little details like that.
> >
> > Thanks to all the talk about the almost complete walker over the past
> > few weeks that I've been passing onto Kyle he was well prepared for the
> > problems that occurred and to avoid most of them all together.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Dave
> >
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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