Body Phase One Finished

 Printing and gluing of the main body parts has now finished.  I still have some gap filling to do and have found that epoxy putty given to me by a friend works very well.  Printing of the head is also going well with around half of the parts done.

Box file layout

 Mounted on 9mm ply to make it more permanent.  Lots of detailing to still do.

Motor mount

Made good progress on the motor mount today.  I have now finished printing all of the main body parts, so now it’s time for the head.  This has around 14 components, so much printing still to be done.  I also managed to glue another part to the front panel this will allow me to finish this part soon.  Square tube looks like the way to go for the internal structure so next will be the design for this, and the second half of the motor mount.

I/O

 Going to look at some code today to use these i/o expanders.  I only have one more part to print for the body, should just have enough filament left to do this tomorrow.  Then we are on to printing the head part. I need to think about how parts are printed so that I get good detail for some of the LED openings.

(I have also made some good progress on the box file layout)

LED plugged into VCC for testing.

More printing and gluing

 Everything starting to come together now, still much more printing, glueing and sanding to go.

Front Panel

The printing continues, but I have most of the parts for the body done.  I have now glued the two front panels together after a light sand with 400 grit wet and dry paper.  Using plenty of water seems to give a good finish as this keeps the plastic cool while sanding.  I used a five minute epoxy and this just gives enough time to align the parts before curing.  I have a couple of gaps to fill, and then it will be on to painting and more sanding.

I have now also finished the second i2c board and will start to investigate I/O expanders.

Progress on Hero Jr

With printing going well, and I’m almost ready to print one of the larger parts (1 Day 3 hours).  I’m currently testing the new wake up the sheds on fire system.  It was quite straight forward to modify a smoke alarm as the model that I have has lots of test pads on the bottom.  One of these goes high to low when the alarm sounds (it drives the led).  A Raspberry Pi in side the house talks to the one in the shed, to see what the current status is.  

I have now finished building  both SC113 backplane boards, although I managed to solder the end connectors on the wrong way round!  This creates a problem for pin 1 now being the wrong end for one board.

I have one more of the I2C boards to finish.  This will allow me to test devices before moving to the Hero Jr.  I now have two CP/M systems both running SCM 1.1 and I have tested cloning the compact flash card to move from the development system to the Hero Jr.  This should allow me to easily backup my work and  move any finished code around quickly.  

My Development system is currently RC2014 Mini with CP/M and 5 slot backplane.  I using CP/M 2.2 with the following software.

ZDE16 - Editor

Z80ASM - Compiler 

DDT - Debug

Windows 10 laptop with Tera Term (Colours set to Green)

Next steps are to look at building the case for the Hero Jr.  I’m going to start sanding down the parts ready for glueing together and coating, and the spray painting.

I’m looking at replicating the original drive mechanics, as I like this idea :-).  

Development System and Hero Jr Brain 

3D Body Parts 

 

Hero Brain

 Some good progress made on the Hero Jr.  Ordered two boards from smallcomputercentral this will give me 12 sockets plus two end connections.  First board stuffed with CPM parts!  Also making progress on printing the body.

Printing Hero Jr

 Printing of the Hero Jr parts is going well, thanks to my Ender 3 Pro and OctoPrint!

But waiting until 1 a.m. is not going to happen again.  Need to build a alarm system to work along side OctoPrint.  Smoke alarm on order from Amazon, with some python I should be able to create an alarm in the house just in case we get smoke when printing.  

Talk’in

 Speech board added to RC2014 mini

Hero Jr 3D model

 Just about finished the model of the Hero Jr, not a complete reproduction but good enough for me.

Next steps are to print it all, this make take some time as most of the parts take around a day to print.

Lockdown Projects

So as I'm not working, and need to be doing something! The current list of projects is this;

 

Remake of Hero Jr - large 3D print and a home for my RC2014 

Learn to program a game on the Gigatron 

Learn ROS2 - Turtlebot3 Burger Project

Build a small railway layout - Boxfile model 

Build some more RC2014 kits

Gigatron and Pluggy Reloaded

Just got a pluggy reloaded PCB, time to see if it all works!