(03-15-2013) More work on dome positioning

I finally got around to mounting the pittman motor to the frame and giving it a test.  It's quite loud if you apply constant pressure to the gears.   I'm currently using a spring and it makes the gears very noisy.  If I mount the motor solid and keep the gears at the proper positions to each other the gears become very quiet.  So I see a custom mount in my near future, maybe something similar to toothboy's mount he made out of a door hinge.


I plan on using the mouse's optical wheel to count the movement of the dome motor.  To do this, the first thing I had to do was trim off the spindles that held it in the mouse.  As you can see in the picture below I used a razor saw to trim off the unwanted pieces.

Next I drilled a hole in the center (okay, okay, it's not even close to the center - but it's just for testing).  I'm ready to start placing everything into the frame.  There is a bit of work to do on the mouse - mounting a mouse button switch to tell the Arduino when the dome is front and cutting off part of the PC board with the phototransistor and IR LED that I can mount next to the dome motor.

And finally I did some testing to see how this optical sensor worked and it's a bit disappointing.  The speed of the dome motor is so fast that maxes out the optical sensing on the arduino.  The range is -127 to 127, and when the dome is full speed it at full -127 or 127 depending on which way it's going.  Next step is to find a different optical wheel with fewer teeth to get a slower reading.

I also mounted the dome motor to the frame and wired it up temporarily.  What a great rush to see R2's dome moving and making sounds!

(03-10-2013) Mouse work conitnues

Got the latest code from Dan and have integrated the PS/2 mouse code into it.  Created a wiring diagram so that hopefully anyone can grab a PS/2 mouse and use it for dome positioning on their own R2 without too much expense or trouble.

Originally I thought I could use the teeth of the A&A gear set to trigger the optical sensors, but the gap appears to be too wide.  When using the gear set I only get the X axis to increment, but it won't decrement, but if I use the wheel included with the mouse it works fine.

(03-09-2013) PS/2 Mouse interface for Dome positioning

Okay, so getting the dome motor running was a good step, but now I wanted to use an optical sensor to keep the position of my dome.  That way we can auto-center the dome or animate the dome if that is something we would like to do.  I tore apart an old PS/2 mouse and wired up the 5vDC, ground, clock and data wires - then I used this code and was able to get input from the mouse (X and Y - no mouse buttons).  Next part will be to integrate this into the Padawan code and get a switch to work for knowing where dome center is located.

(03-09-2013) And now dome motor control!

I had previously wired up my Syren 10A into the mix, but I had released the magic smoke playing with it previously and it wouldn't work.  Yesterday (03-08-2013) the new Syren 10A arrived and I was able to just wire it into place, set the dip switches (switch 1 off, all others on) and it works great now.  I also added in a ground loop isolator to keep the MP3Trigger from being fried by the powering up of the amp (seems to be a common problem).