Dynamic Animatronic Vehicular Entity (AKA: Cyber-Dave) |
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2004 |
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| December |   |
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A
Christmas social for the team at good old Pizza Hut. Time for us
to relax and have a good time together.
So far, most of what we have done has been deliberately kept under wraps. Once the robot really starts to come together during 2005, we will feel better about releasing some technical details and actual DAVE project photos. Promise. |
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| May
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 Mike
brought over an amazing maquette he had made of DAVE which showed us
just how the finished product could look.
John had also knocked up a prototype head
out of aluminium sheet to see what problems might be encountered making
his head from metal. It seemed to work out OK as a test piece, but
weight will be a deciding factor.
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| March
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 Second
meeting at John's place again. Mike
brought some DAVE concept drawings over to show
the team. We also had a test run of a prototype animatronic hand
and glove sender unit which proved a few design ideas for us.
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| February
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Some
secret goings on. The team gets together for it's first meeting to
test out a lash-up of our animatronic test rig. This was the first
time we could see if our ideas were going to work.
George and Ian supplied the electronics, control software and the sender rig, and we wired it into John's arm test rig. Considering this was a first attempt, everything worked more or less first time and there were a lot of smiles all round! There was also a lot of tea drunk, which was to become something of a regular format in following meetings.
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All text and images © the DAVE project team 2004 |
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Here's
a shot of Mike playing with an enormous pneumatic ram. Don't ask me
to explain it, but playing with this thing always seems to have everyone
in hysterics! Kids, huh?
