Saturday, June 19, 2010

Minor repairs to servo linkages, upgrading speakers

During R2's first public appearance, a lot of kids were curious, tugging on R2's doors and panels that open.  As a result, some are a bit out of alignment and need to be fixed so the panels and doors close completely again.

The doors that are having the most problems have plastic servo horns.  I have found that due to the space limitations the frame and body allow, sometimes they do not have enough length to pull the door closed firmly.

A trip to my local hobby store (King's Mountain R/C in Orrington) again provides me with some ideas to try.  I picked up some aluminum servo horns (1.25 inches), new connectors, pushrods and ball-joint style connections.  I am in hopes the ball-joint style connector will provide a better connection to the hinge, removing some of the slack.


The other task I need to do is replace the blown, external laptop speakers with something better.  The speakers worked well, being USB powered and all....but with only 1.5 watt of output, it was just a matter of time before all those beeps and chirps overwhelmed them.


One of my fellow builders gave me some speakers that went to his computer's surround sound setup.  He upgraded to a bigger system and was going to throw these away.  They have RCA-style connectors, so I had to run to the local Radio Shack for an adaptor to fit into R2's netbook.


Off to make the modifications!