Sunday, December 12, 2021

A Garage, at last

 


I finally have space in my garage to start building, welding, machining. I'm hoping to make some quick progress as soon as craziness at work dies down a little.


Lander Updates: Avionics Bae

Some more progress on what I've dubbed the avionics bae of the lander. This houses the flight computer/connector board stack, power board, batteries, peripheral board, relay board, connectors, etc etc. I designed the divider panels to be 3d printed and have heat-sert threaded inserts. The metal parts were designed in CAD, laser cut, and bent using SendCutSend (excellent service, so affordable). The whole assembly is super rigid, and works well.  I added a PC fan for cooling, and the box is mounted using wire rope isolators for vibration isolation.



I also designed and printed  custom enclosure for the ODrive board, it also has everything secured with heat inserts, which work surprisingly well. This box will drive the brushless linear actuators I designed for the thrust vector control actuators. The USB cable was carefully picked for fit, and will get epoxied in place to make sure it does not back out. I wish I had a better solution, but that's the best I can do.
I tried unsoldering the screw terminal mounts, and even using my heat gun, but they're stubborn. I figured it'd be better for vibe just to solder to the pads. But so far I haven't been able to get a cable to back out by futzing around, so guess it might be okay. We will do more testing later.