Generally speaking, testing days are some of the least fun and most necessary parts of the work. It's never as quick as one hopes, often fraught with nested, independent hurdles, and any progress we do make seems vastly disproportionate, in the bad way, relative to the effort required.
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| Ol' Foamy (sans eyes). Also n.b. the egregious amounts of caffeine and junk food that fuel serial Saturday workdays. |
Ol' Foamy's job is to hold everything in place while we test two of our servos. We installed a wooden arm on each, to which weights can be attached so we can get a baseline idea of how they perform in vacuum while under load. Note the successive layers of tape; this is rapid prototyping at its finest. Handsome Dan did a great job whipping together the original test stand in an hour, and we've been improving on it every test day.
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| Documentation! is! important! |
Keeping in mind that this is essential to the project's success is sometimes difficult. We occasionally take breaks, though, to shore up morale. Today we rested our eyes a bit; we've been selecting googley eyes that are right for "Ol' Foamy", our test stand, so that its constant shaking and gyrations will be more amusing. (I forgot to take pictures of the end result, but will post them later.)
Here are a couple photos from today's break. I decided not to try it as a selfie for reasons that may be apparent:
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