unicornduke: (Default)
[personal profile] unicornduke
I had to leave PA before we got the scarecrow physically up. I had completed it, got it ready for parents and then there was a pouring rainstorm so I was delayed leaving because I didn't want to get my stuff wet and no use trying to put electronics up in the rain. 

It was working last night and shut itself down around 9 according to dad, and the programming. 

This morning, he went out and it was twitching randomly. After some poking, it appears that the pan servo is not having a good time, dad burned his finger on the heat sink. So my guess is that when it shut down last night, the servo didn't quite manage it right and stayed twitching overnight. Now it's broken somehow, probably overheating. It's also not drawing a constant current from the buck converter, so I'm not really 100% sure on why that is but it coincides with the twitching and stuff. 

It's currently off, and dad will test it later to see if cooling it down has helped anything. If that's the case, I suspect maybe a diode would help in case of current blowback from the lasers into the buck converter and perhaps a new motor type. I'm looking into brushless DC motors, which might do better. I could also program it to have on sequences and off sequences, maybe two minutes each so it has time to cool. hmmmm. I need to do more research. 

Date: 2019-07-22 06:01 pm (UTC)
graydon: (Default)
From: [personal profile] graydon
Even if you don't decide to sell these as your dad has been suggesting, by all means put "laser scarecrow construction" on your resume!

There are new-grad electro-and-mechanical engineers who would have given up by now.

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