I took a break from looking at hardware for about. 6 hours, got back to it and solved the problem 0-0. this is why it’s good to take breaks lol. Retested it on an arduino nano and it did refuse to go to zero. Not sure what was up with that, the code was fine though. That board has also been through a bit. Got to working on the design for the boxes to hold the mirrors and diffraction grating.
more painting plus breadboarding: painting was fine, easy, peaceful. Breadboarding??? I have pretty good troubleshooting skills, but also my stuff doesn’t work half the time due to faulty parts, or wiring, or.. code, etc. I started with a stepper motor that hadn’t been through the depths, and a corresponding driver. Tried one set of code, no input from the pot was working, swapped out the pot for one I know works from using it in a separate project. No luck, stepper motor I know works because it was moving during the first test. Just didn’t change speed. Stepper driver also works I’m pretty sure because it did light up as the motor moved. 2 things down. Swapped the board since most of mine are off brand and a little suspicious. Used a board I know works from a previous project that also used pot analog input. Swapped code for a move with pot (location) code, checked libraries, updated no issues. Swapped the breadboard, honestly still don’t trust the one I grabbed. Though it looks… okay. I will also check the rails (no corrosion!) could be a wire issue. I need to grab my multimeter… but um… the probes on that are also broken. Or well one is. I feel like I’m playing murder investigator and I’m personally not a fan. 😮💨 I also set up serial monitor and tried a couple things and I just simply get 14. Okay. 14. Okay.
tolerance will be the death of me: redesign one showed me that my tolerance was off, and that the area at the top to screw things in was simply too small for the printer and therefore also would not be very stable. Re did that design for version 3 and did tolerance for 0.1 mm… which should have been good (spoiler it still didn’t fit i rechecked my measurements I guess the printer simply needs more tolerance.) but it was not. I did add the upper area and made it 5 mm across on all sides. then added reinforcement pillars because after maybe 20 min of fanagaling the loft function, I still had some odd spaces that would not be stable so… pillar stability it is. Which after printing? looks fine and is acceptable in my mind. Though, because of the part that still didn’t fit with tolerance I did chop it off because I didn’t want to make another version right at that moment. (11pm) I used a Dremel and the circular blade bit. Doing my best to not injure myself and also had my safety glasses on wowie! After chopping some stuff off and then testing it, the idea works, tested then with holding together the preemptive lens holders and also works pretty well. the holder with no lenses will not be used, but the 0.55 and 0.1 will be. I might be able to improve them somehow but IDK yet. Biggest hard part is getting. them. to stay on? That’s a problem for later and horrible evil cad design. Also painted the outsides black to absorb stray light while the insides stay white to reflect light. bulb collator v3 (will be updated later)
got the v1 collector off the printer and took a looksee, tolerance was… almost there. I’ll probably do a little more next time for the clamp. The main issue was that the lip of the bulb holder and the starting curve of the collector were simply too close. An extended region of about another 10 mm in height should fix the problem plus I’ll change the sides to go up straight… ish? not the curved version. Plus, needs more clamps and or a better method of attachment after grtting it around. wait. So. I may be silly. I could print it all in one go… because i can slide it in…. oh… my… getting it to stay i could use pins somehow. Unsure. The sides will also need to be much thicker in order to be able to mount the lenses on, but this was a good test of concept! I’m pretty happy with it all things considered about 2 hours for a print and a couple of mishaps but came out ok. I’m not super deep into printing settings yet so if you have recommendations… lmk.
fighting with CAD, I don’t usually use OnShape since at my school we used inventor, but that requires a license and so far onshape has not been too bad. I may download fusion later but just haven’t gotten to all that. I got a clamp set up designed for around the bulb housing and I have an idea in mind but modeling it is a little harder then expected. As per usual, with CAD. I also don’t often use assemblies so I might have to look up a couple of videos on that as well. I added tolerance and I’m hoping when I give it a test print it should be ok, but knowing 3D printing there might be something wrong at some point. I’m trying to design it in a way that it can be printed facing up with minimal supports. Hopefully! (these are the measurements of the insides of the lenses)
gathering supplies and taking measurements !!! I have three microscope / camera attachments I am going to try and make a secondary attachment for to test with a lightbulb as a finer beam source of light
