Next!!!

Suffering badly from a lack of motivation. I see numerous YouTuber's building excellent robotic mechanisms and they have their 3d printer so finely tuned that it makes awesome results (of course, there could be editing in there as well).

On the other hand, I have several projects that are at the "useful working stage" rather than than complete, so as usual, the interest has waned. Think CNC router, 3D printer pimping and SpaceMouse keypad combo. All of them do the job I need but not in a polished/optimal/convenient way. Enclosures, end stops, calibration, circuit boards are all things that need to be done to round out the projects so until a shard of metal flies the 40cm from the drill press to the 500W power supply or exposed PCBs, the project management has gone into a hiatus.

Time now for a project just for the fun of it. Did a quick pricing of 9225 brushless motors and useful drivers resulting in a bout of depression. There is no way I can justify swapping my bank account balance for that class of components - and to make something impressive requires a lot of those components.

I lowered my expectations and have moved to a project that I've always wanted to do. Sure, these days the commercial products are quite good but I have ideas to improve the functionality in completely impracticable, ugly and inefficient ways - and is that not how we roll in the amateur shire?

Last night it was time to do some quick planning and order some components so they will eventually arrive on the slow boat from China. I'm not going to reinvent the wheel here so I've ordered components/modules that I know will be a pain to manufacture or just take up precious time. Watching a couple of YouTube teardowns of commercial products has initially saved me as I was going to completely over-engineer this project. Sure, it is going to need upgrading as time goes on but a good modular design should not make that a hassle.

Last night's pre-design spur of the moment purchases:

I won't question anybody's intelligence by asking them to guess what I am building. Sure I can buy something off the shelf but I want to seriously pimp this thing with mopping/scrubbing facilities, extendible boom to get right into corners, flexible brushing/vacuuming system to clean skirtings etc. This is an industrial beast, not a pretty consummer item - not a smooth shiny faring in sight. I think the groinal attachment will appropriately set people's expectations.