My wife has to go to an all day team bonding session at her law firm today so the toys came out, although I did solve a problem she raised when I started out on this caper in her absence. I picked up a packet of six rather strong magnets at Jaycar last weekend and spent a couple of hours on the robot just now starting by supergluing the magnets out the front of the chasis so that any of her earrings that have dropped off the coffee table onto the floor are spared. My next door neighbor may well think I am a nutcase because he seemed to spend a lot of time just now taking out the rubbish; I imagine so he could figure out why I was gluing magnets to the front of a floorsweeper head and taking photos of it with a self satisified grin on my face.
I also used the cordless drill I grabbed the other week and put some holes in the back of the thing and mounted a power switch and power light as well as mounting the battery pack on the top (it's far too big go inside the chasis, I may wind up mounting a lot of stuff on top for this reason). So I am underway officially. I tooled around with the motor I got and how I will make it actually drive the thing forward. It has a worm-gear that came with it, I may need to actually make some sort of gearbox for it because it's quite powerful (good thing) but much, much to fast; and to think I bought one that said low speed and high torque. I can't imagine what the hell sort of speed the fast one delivers, because it threw the gear from one end of a makeshift axel (coathanger - wirecutters) where it wasn't fixed but was sitting, to the other. I need to figure out a way of slowing it down.
