brock craft

Most of the day was spent mounting and testing the rest of the solenoids. These little gems put out a nice 5 grams or so, depending on how much the spring is loaded and how much current they get hold of. They will do fine with a 100ms duty cycle.

I ganged them up on the back of the magnetone frame and used hot glue to adhere them to cable ties and to keep the cables managed. The glue also came in handy for wrangling the return spring. It was not attached to the body of the solenoid, so I had to come up with a clever way to do so - the hot glue was just the trick. I don’t know how many cycles it will last, but this stuff is pretty sticky, so I am pretty comfortable with it in the short run. A longer term solution with some sort of mechanical fixture would be better. As soon as I get hold of a laser cutter…

Last, but not least a soft rubber tip is needed to strike the chimes. Metal to metal is harsh, so I’m dulling the plunger tip with…drum roll…a little squidge of hot glue! It’s the salve of the prototyping gods…

The last little to-do, was to begin the breadboard for the circuit. I borrowed todbot’s clever idea to make a homespun Arduino Shield out of a perfboard and some pin-strips. In the end, the two will mate perfectly and the daughterboard will be easily removable for any maintenance or debugging…

Breadboard

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Brockenspiel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.