We kept having the chain pop off of our Maslow so we decided to build a new and improved chain management system and now our Maslow is purring like a panther. This was a collab between myself and Daniel Rivera his insta is @smokeless_mirror and my personal is @arteagaway. In this video we are using the system to make a save the bee exhibit on behalf of our brothers and sisters at the karma honey project that are helping to relocate bee hives here in Puerto Rico.
Youtube video of the build:
The larger project is a non profit interactive art exhibit that we are building in an iconic old building in the heart of Old San Juan, re-opening for the public to enjoy and generating income to support education in STEAM.
If I did it again, I would try and keep the counterweights further apart from each other. I would also use more pulleys instead of the piece of plastic (Hard delrin) that I used on the backside to position the paracord on and have it slide. We just didn’t have anymore pulleys laying around haha.
Bunjee cord on the sled is key to hold the router with downward pressure so the z-axis stays consistent. This is a separate tip, what I mean is use a bungee cord to keep the router pressed down on the router sled at all times or your z axis may be off as it can get stuck.
Sled was a Green Monster planet I call it, I was messing around with that spray painting technique using magazine paper and crumpling that a lot of street artists do, super fun and Uline catalogs are perfect for it haha. That was fun.
Another BIG issue I had initially was accidentally putting the shield on incorrectly. The slight mis-alignment of the motorshield naturally kept the board from being able to communicate with the motors and ALSO only putting the power plug into the top shield not the base board because the base board gets power from the USB cord.
Another really annoying thing is that if you have any type of screensaver or screen lock setting on, ground control will stop the cut when the screen locks so be aware of that. I did not have a chance to get this up and running with the new cloud based user interface yet on a pi or something because I have a Mac and its as just easier to use the latest version of ground control for Mac for the time being.
careful on using a bungee on the router. many people have had the orange plastic tab fail latter which plunges the whole router into the plywood and can cause a fire.
I agree counter weights are best method. That is why we have included pullies with our kits from day one.
