First integration

Physical proof of concept was complete. Now its time to integrate with electronics and proper components and see how well that works.

One of my teammates just recently got a 3D printer and made the baseplate out of the shimmery purple material. It was absolutely stunning so we used that for the first test.

First step was pressing in bearings and fitting everything together. It spun so smoothly and was super fun to play with as a fidget toy. We also got the micro DC geared motors installed.

When researching components to drive the assembly, we only needed H-bridges for the DC motors. All feedback is received from the photoresistors on the solar panels and a simple PID control drive the DC motors until desired location. The gears make it slow enough for it to be stable and in space they’d be much much slower for longevity. And the sun rise at LEO isn’t exactly super fast.

Wires soldered to the motors and the assembly actually moves when given a DC voltage directly to the motor. Great success! We had one solar panel taped on that was leftover from last quarter.

Now, remember how I said 3d printing these gears was not advises. Yup, the friction between them is too great for the DC motors, hence the jittery motion. This was the incentive to reach out to the machine shop’s nylon SLS printers to get the gears manufactured as my 0.2mm nozzle FDM prints weren’t cutting it.

Next steps is to also replace the PLA parts with ABS. Not something super critical but I want to maximize the strength a bit more before putting it through tests.