Another Sunday, this time with 1 hour less sleep than usual. But not to worry, we both still put in a good days work despite that.

Today was another focus on the electrics. However, let's go back in time slightly - over the course of the week. Colin has removed the original container for the much smaller ESC we first planned to use, and has built a much larger one in a different position to contain the rather large Cytron ESC. During the week, I had also sourced some cables which would come in use today...

Dragging back to the slightly less back in time of today, we had a few issues getting some plugs onto some cables.
Unfortunately for some reason, we didn't manage to get the soldering iron (two of them), to solder in any meaningful manner. After a while of faffing around and achieving not much, Colin ended up finding his blowtorch and using that. Over the top, but certainly got the job done in record time. Next week, I'll take the soldering iron I have at home and see if that does any better - as using a blowtorch. Colin had also acquired some junction boxes, this allows us to split the battery power between the main Cytron ESC and the two traction motors, to another as yet to be decided ESC and the weapon motor. We found a nice little spot to put the junction out of harms way, but still relatively easy to access without having to remove it from its new home for maintenance. We also found a spot for the main fuse, which is now lovingly zip tied in place. The circuit starts at the batteries, then immediately into the link, after it goes into the fuse, and then as evidenced on image 1, straight into the junction box between the ESCs and motors - each motor still has its own fuse.

We finished off today by drilling some holes into the new ESC container for all the cables to go through. Because the Cytron ESC doesn't use plugs, and you simply screw the bare wires into it, this was an easy task as we didn't need to account for cable plugs in the hole size. Colin has fashioned a lid for this new ESC container, as well as extra side armor to protect the fairly thin box of the container, which we'll hopefully have done by next week along with the rest of the wiring (image 2)

We are thinking of using a FeatherTwo ESC for the weapon motor. However we're unsure of the best way to reduce the LiPo batteries of 24V (the 'flat' voltage') to 33.6V (fully charged) (2 x 14.8v nominal) to the near 24V required by a FeatherTwo, and carrying an extra battery exclusive for that ESC is not the ideal situation for us. So we may need to scratch that and find a different ESC for the task.


the images
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