We started out playing with batteries. Alan has several that won't take a charge anymore.
So I suggested that we try putting more water in the batteries. I did this with two of
my batteries and it revived them to the point where they were useable again. Unfortunately
I put too much water in my batteries and they spit out water when I charge them.
We started with my soda bottle water injector. It makes it real easy to get the water into
the battery. But you can't nearure it as you fill the battery. Alan found a hypodermic
needle thing and we used that. We could measure the water in CCs as we added it. So we
put water in the big battery and it still wouldn't take a charge. So we put water in
his smaller battery. It wouldn't take a charger either. So we left the small one on the
charger to see if it would come back to life.
Then we moved on to the pick-and-place robot. (See the last few weeks for more details.)
Last week we wired up some DC amplifiers to the motor controller and got one channel
working. Alan played with it during the week and decided the amplifiers weren't supplying
enough power. They had been modified before ending up in the trash, so we had to figure out
how to modify them back. Brynn brought his "wheel chair" balancing robot over. It has on
of the amplifiers that had not been modified. So we changed some resistors on the amps and
got one to put out 1.5A, which was the limit of the power supply.
Then we spent most of the night trying various combinations of parameters for the motor
controller. We also measured the repeatablitiy of the arm and decided it has a problem.
So we tried motor parameters and got it working fairly well.
We also discussed using paraffin wax to cool electronic components. We had various
physics books out and we ran lots of calculations. We decided this should justify
some experiments in the future.
-Jeff
