Shenanigans, Light Sabers, etc.

Well with the first week of school happening and me now possessing an R/C vehicle that drives on freaking walls and ceilings, I've been quite distracted. I've been working on designing a little motor-driven pan and tilt mount that holds one of these unsafely powerful lasers light sabers that Alex will be spending way too much money on though. If you don't know already, these lasers cost thousands of dollars because...well, let's just say light saber is literally a better name for them, rather than laser. I'm pretty excited to carve my name into unsuspecting people's arms from afar see it in action. So here's v0.2 of the pan and tilt mount:

Don't ask about v0.1, it was just a bad idea altogether.

So I designed this thing with my new love in mind. It's like 90% laser-cut acrylic, because when your suction car which has an acrylic chassis falls from a 10ft ceiling three times and everything but the chassis breaks (I don't want to talk about it), acrylic suddenly becomes the new steel. I think it will look awesome with clear acrylic anyways...oh speaking of which, I can actually apply that material to parts in 123D.

Instant cloak of invisibility.

The gears will be laser cut from the wonder-plastic that I've been dying to work with, Delrin. You don't even know how excited I am to design my own gears, by the way. Oh and then the little aluminum main mount will be machined by Alex because he loves me (although I guess this whole design isn't really for me anyways), and because these people lied and apparently I can't use the UCF machine shop after all. Oh well.

Then of course the actual pan and tilt functions will be powered by these little gems that I love so very much. This of course gives me an excuse to design some extremely simple motor controllers and maybe learn a little more about those silly little electrons. I ordered some of these incredibly awesome little joysticks partly to control this pan and tilt thing, and partly just because...LOOK AT THEM! You want some too, don't even try to lie. Anyways...looks like I'll be designing my first H-bridges. I've hardly even thought about that yet...I'll get around to it.