Category: Dropship

Over the past 3 weeks I have completely gutted the existing motion control platform and rebuilt it using convoluted bellows. One structural change was made with the platform itself in the front right corner to provide bolt holes for the front right bellow.

The bellows are capable of lifting 4000 pounds EACH. The question is how quickly I can inflate and deflate them. I have my eye on the Numatics E22 but none of the ones on eBay currently support the analog input variant. I will be conducting tests on the rear right bellow using a ControlAir 500X.

Only other thing we are waiting for is 3 inch aluminum extrusions to make a base frame for the platform to rest on when not in operation (otherwise we would compress the bellows beyond their design limit of 2.8 inches).

Sly helped me do some insulation work and overhead templates for the overhead interior paneling this weekend. I will hopefully purchase two sheets of Masonite today.

It has been almost 7 months since I fired up the compressor and performed some PID loop tests.  Everything powered up except this one USB hub (cheap Chinese crap).

Overall I am very concerned about moving the stuff out of the basement and onto the trailer at this point.  It still seems very squirrely and unstable for where we should be at.

I am sorry that I resold my convoluted bellows because I am thinking that is a better solution at this point even if we are only looking at 10 degrees of roll/pitch and 7″ heave.  The biggest issue I had back when I tested them is that, because of the volume, it took too long to fill.  But now I am using a bigger compressor, larger diameter lines, and control valves that can deliver up to 60 SCFM.

I went ahead and acquired an Air Lift Dominator 2600 on eBay for $70 with free shipping so I can run tests again.  I am not sure if I will be able to make it work with the proportional flow controller or if I need something like this proportional pressure controller.

Worst case scenario would be to build a frame overhead and apply downward force against a spring assembly which is what I did with the Audrey.

Check out this wish from Intuit’s Small Business Growing Strong campaign. You can help my small business grow by voting for its wish to come true this spring! Vote at http://bit.ly/11zseR3

Working on clouds over lunch and got the V-pass done for the Gaussian blurring. This shot looks particularly good… but it was done by using the source alpha blended with the original color rather than the inverse of the source alpha… so don’t get your hopes up yet.

Waiting to install this completed interior panel with all attachment locations denoted in red.  This is for the starboard side and it is scheduled for tomorrow night.

Also posted a YouTube video of some tests I conducted with the Linear Proportional SSR featured in an earlier post.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=_s5UqZUFfZo]

Trying to come up with an 80/20 extruded aluminum solution to this problem since my friends at Motion for Simulators apparently have no interest in selling this component.

I had an idea a while back. I rented a van in Florida for our family vacation last year. Not sure if it was a good or bad thing but as the engine power would fluctuate it was noticeable that the blower speed fluctuated (like the battery was dead and the alternator was the only thing powering the blower).  Anyway it reminded me of a similar effect in a jet – since the cabin air is taken off a stage of the engine compression it would change the pressure and noise level in the cabin almost directly. Then I went to the Sigur Ros concert in Kansas City last Thursday and saw they were independently controlling incandescent lights on stage!  My friends at Phidgets led me to this article which lead me to Proportional SSR’s and voila!

Ah, but sadly Crydom recommends against using these for inductive (motor, transformer) loads.  Not sure why or what would happen so I bought one on eBay to experiment with.  In the event that my experiment goes horribly wrong:

Fortunately the blower motor that we are using has a tapped winding and I could switch between these three speeds using a standard AC SSR.

In other news, finished the forward bulkhead insulation and moved onto the starboard interior paneling.  That is ready to paint with the kids tonight!

These are all the lowest class or “scout” class vessels for each of the three factions.

Installed rigid foam insulation (1.5″) in the frontal area of the ship (design would not allow for more but it is a relatively small area).

I also worked on dressing up the swivel bracket (previously it was exposed lumber).

Finally, I fixed the “black” square issue… turns out a lot of my colors were off because I was using “char” instead of “unsigned char” to read them from the file.