February 19, 2021
After a wild two years, I am pleased to announce that this project is starting up again.
For those who have not been following my other newsfeeds, the astromech project had to be suspended in 2019 when I suffered a medical emergency requiring emergency surgery and a year of recovery. I was just preparing to start again when the COVID pandemic hit, and I could no longer access my workshop for eight months. When I returned in the winter of 2020 I discovered that my 3D printer had failed, requiring the purchase of a replacement model.
So now I have received the new 3D printer, and I am in the process of setting it up and getting it calibrated. Assuming that there are no more catastrophes, I expect to start printing again in the Spring.
And hopefully by the summer I can start producing some photos and video for my followers. Following that, we make it sentient and hope it doesn't decide to take over the world :)
September 30, 2018
So I haven't made as much progress on the project as I had hoped to, but I thought it was time for a quick update anyway.
I have now printed most of the parts for the head frame, but I have hit a little snag. On my 3D printer, the larger parts of the frame just barely fit onto the printing bed. Worse still is that because my printer is a little slower than I would like, the layers are cooling too quickly to get a clean print. And that means that I cannot print all of the parts on my office mac...
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June 15, 2018
Today marks the beginning of an interesting new project. I have decided to build my own astromech droid!
As many of you know, I have been active in robotics for many years and have built numerous
small robots to test new ideas and algorithms. At one point I even worked with some friends on a crowd funded robotics platform before the project was shut down due to lack of funding. But I have never had the opportunity to take my robotics to the next level and build a full size, Star Wars inspired ...
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