SMALdog gets a new (printed!) head!

13 Mar 2010 3d-printing  arbotix  smaldog  robots  I've been slowly getting the Makerbot tuned in, moving to using an SD card made a huge improvement in build quality, and I'm finally comfortable enough with the bot to walk away for a while. So, today I finally printed SMALdog's new head, the largest item I've printed to date, and my first >1h print.


The first one looked great, but about half way through, the pile of ABS got all coiled up, I walked back in to find that the print head and Z-carriage were pulled to the top of the bot, and the ABS was hanging off the side. De-tangle, reset, chop off about 10-20ft of ABS, and tried again. This print took 1h38m.


I then cleaned it up, attached the dual IR sensors, and the AX-12 servo. The 5/8" hole for the sonar sensor needed quite a bit of cleanup, but everything else was nearly perfect. I've now got all the sensors except the IR photodiode mounted, and the head is on SMALdog.


Now, I've got about 4 wks before the fire fighting competition. Hopefully that is enough time to tune his walking gait, load the map following code in, and get everything else working....