4WD Front Hinge Flipper - Featherweight

[dotDominic]

So it's update time and I finally got the actuator going - It really worked

...

For about 10 minutes, then it broke itself.

I've got a quick, badly-filmed video here which shows it running on 5s with a low throttle setting:



Rory's Arduino sketch deliberately reduces the power/speed of the motor, but this can be changed to give more power (Big thanks to him and his really useful video + easy to follow Arduino sketch). So I thought it would be a great idea to increase the power a bit, and then it broke. Interestingly it still wasn't anywhere near full power though - I think I only increased it by about 25%.

However! There is a morsel of good news! The motor did stall for a short while, and the gears + the threaded rod are all absolutely fine. I'm not entirely sure what the problem is - I suspect the failure lies on this soft plastic piece which travels up and down the barrel of the actuator, and pushes out the steel rod. Right now it can travel forwards/outwards, but this plastic piece does not want to go backwards/retract along the threaded rod and down the barrel. I think if I could replace this part with some sort of the metal threaded fitting, then this would really work. So I'm not beaten yet! I'll do an autopsy to try and see what the problem is - unfortunately I can't get this plastic piece out, perhaps because it is damaged, so this may involve cutting the end of the barrel off, but I will see.

EDIT: Looking back, it's not as slow on the lower setting as I remember. If cranking up the power really doesn't work out then I might just use the motor as I did in the video.