It's high time we make another blog update

It's high time we add another picture too. I don't have one at the moment, but we will probably have more stuff to add by Thursday. I am calling just to talk about what we did on Monday and Tuesday. On Monday, I don't remember exactly what we did, but I strongly suspect that we worked on the counterweight design. Our work over the last few days, up to and including Monday, was making tweaks to get the whole grabber assembly to fit within the radius of the wheels. By shortening the grabber itself and rebuilding it once, we have succeeded. Getting the thing to fit within the wheel radius was likely to be the one damning factor in our design; if the grabber smashes into the side of the bucket and gets caught on the way up, it ain't going anywhere. Another thing that we had been working on up until and including Monday was periodically asking around about why the servos did not turn for their full 60 degrees in each direction; they turned only 60 degrees total, that is 30 degrees in each direction. This was quite problematic indeed, for our design depended on getting the full 120 degree rotation from the servos.

On Tuesday we learned that the wireless control system simply refuses to push the servos beyond 30 degrees in each direction. We spent that day ripping apart our grabber, extracting the servos (that we never intended to make removable, by the way) so we could get them modified for a full 360 degree rotation. Actually this will work better anyway because the servo that tilts the grabber (to specify a bit more, this is not the one that opens and closes the grabber or the one that raises and lowers the drawbridge) will be able to just rest on an outcropping (that we will take a picture of today) instead of wasting energy by exerting a constant, unnecessary force to keep the grabber tilted properly.