It’s been a frantic few days, mainly getting the embedded assembly language debugged on the welly wanger.
This afternoon, we transported it down to the department, and doing some testing on a grassy area outside, then the weather broke.
I moved the car next to the machine, so that I could keep the laptop dry whilst keeping firing, which we did for a short while, and we were achieving reasonable distances – I have records of over 40 metres on some shots with plenty of power to spare. The crosswinds were quite gruesome, and we nearly lost a welly a couple of times, but Tom managed to recover them every time.
The the rain really started, and we were gratful for the tarpaulins that I’d bought last weekend, as evidenced by the photo.
We had a couple of problems – one of the motor solenoids came loose and shorted out against the chassis, causing it to activate unexpectecly. Then, as the rain started to ease, we were doing a last couple of tests, and the motor released some “magic blue smoke” – if we don’t have a big motor, we don’t have a machine, and it looked like ours was dead – nothing electrical works after the “magic blue smoke” is released.
We took the motor back to Ians, and found the problem – probably due to us runnning it at 24V we had overheated the main supply wire inside the motor case, melted the insulation, and it had shorted to the case. We spent an hour or so rebuilding the connections, and tested the motor – it works off load – we just have to re-install it tomorrow before driving down there.
Travelling tomorrow, competing Wednesday, then holiday for a few days.