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!
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