BMX Dokumentär Del1

Jag har jobbat en tid med min BMX Dokumentär och är nu klar med första delen som handlar om 80-talet och om hur Sporten kom till Sverige.

The Wood Pong Game

FPV Buggy update

I made a new short video with my FPV Buggy.

I mounted a HD camera behind the driver, I still have the FPV camera for the videogoggles in the drivers head. I also changed to a brushless setup for some extra power! 

Skinny laminated leg x return of building the robot

I have returned to my robot build. My latest build update was when I made a new try at curved laminated legs. Now almost a year later I have finally found new motivation to finish my build. I have sanded the legs to the correct shape and have started with the leg mechanism that will be connected to the body.

FPV Baja Buggy Video

I put together a short video of my FPV Baja Buggy

Virtual Baja Buggy

I have been fond of the Baja style buggys since I was about 10years old. It was the 80s and I obsessed with the 1:10 scale Tamiya and Kyosho buggys RC buggys from that era. I save my money for two years to be able to afford to buy one for my birthday. I was a Tamiya The Fox and me and my Father spent some time assembling it on the kitchen table. I have owned a few RC buggys since then but I not in recent years. I have noticed that many of old classic 70-80s 1:10 scale buggys are coming back in reissue models, and I got a an new urge to build one! But this time I wanted to make it a little different! I wanted to build one of the classic buggys with a FPV (First Person View) camera connected to a video transmitter to be able to drive the car with a pair of videogoggles.

 I chose the Tamiya Fast Attack Vehicle for two reasons, it's a classic car that I remember and it's also one of the most scale like buggies with a good driver figure that fit my purpose well.

This is what the original chassis look like. I am not a big fan of the suspension and have no plans to use the military theme of the original model. 

The driver head with a Mobius camera sensor mounted. I could have used a much smaller analog camera, but I know that half of the project would be lost if I cant share the experience of driving my buggy in HD. I modified a Mobius HD camera with the Camera module on a 20cm cord and have the rest of the camera unit left in the original camera case. This way I have a small enough camera to mount in the head and still be able to record the video in HD and also use the video-out port to my video transmitter for my live feed. 

One of the other things I really wanted was to have the arms and the steering wheel to move in a realistic way. To achieve this I mounted the steering wheel on a small 5gram RC servo. Later I connected the hands to the body with flexible silicone wire and latex fabric (inside out) to create  realistic arms.

I had a lot of trouble choosing a theme to the buggy, but then I walked across this Surf Volkswagen Beetle and knew that I wanted something similar for my buggy.

I wanted the car to match my new white "scale" suspension shocks and I found a 1:10 scale sticker bomb sheet on E-bay. And at the same time my friend sent me some stickers from his new company: dwbtoftshit! (don't want to be to old for this shit!) and think that suits this car very well.
To be able to mount the scale shocks on front I had to order "The Wild One" damper mounts.
The 70mm shocks proved to be a little to long and I had to cut the spring a little to get the right stance. I might have reduced suspension the travel in the process but I didn't find shorter scale shocks. I think the suspension travel is enough for the kind of driving I plan to use it for.
The rims where painted black instead of the gray color.

From alot of the research pictures I looked at, alot of the buggys used to have double or tripple rear shocks. I made some aluminium mounting brackets to be able to put double chocks on my buggy. The scale shocks turned out to be a little to soft, and I changed to a set of harder/thicker springs.

In my research a also came across James Knight 3D printed dummy Volkswagen engine on Shapeways. I knew right away that I needed one of those! I also order a black "RS540 Tamiya Sport tuned" motor to match the black dummy motor. 

I wanted a spare tire to get the right look, and this is the bracket I fabricated to mount it.

The 5.8Ghz video transmitter was placed in the box behind the driver. It was used for batteries in the original layout. I made a hole for the antenna mount. 

Since the video transmitter generates a lot of heat I wanted something to cool it to prevent it from burning up. the solution was to use two 25mm 12v computer fans. I cut out the material needed and drilled mounting holes. I also found a fine metal-net as cover.

25mm 12v Fans mounted.

complete with protective net.

Driver is seated. I also fabricated a new aluminium roof  and a front bumper (not seen on this picture)

I don't want it to be too obvious that it's a FPV car and there fore I wanted a discrete antenna for my video transmitter. I used  a normal coaxial cable and made my own antenna. The top part where the coaxial shielding ends is the active part and is cut to 12.92mm to match the 5.8Ghz frequency.

In the end I put gray heat shrink around both the video and the RC 2.4Ghz antenna to have just one antenna. The active part of the 2.4Ghz is below the active part of the 5.8Ghz antenna to keep them separated. This might not be the best solution but it seems to work good egough.

To keep the installation clean and discrete I used a braided sleeve for my motor cables.

I made safety nets for the side windows. The gray antenna can be seen on top.

I'm very pleased with the end result, both the looks and the driving experience. The extension cord on the HD camera pickups some interference that turns up as purple color in the picture. I might try to shield the cord to see if I that can solve the problem. I use Fatshark video googles when driving to to get a feeling of leaving the body and entering a race buggy. I'm thinking of modding the RC-controller with a real steering wheel  to make illusion complete. 

Roto-cast

I have been thinking of building a Roto-cast machine for a long time, and now I have finally started building one! I found a really good webpage how to do it and didn't really have a good reason not to build one: http://www.solsylva.com/cnc/rotomolder.shtml 

I pretty much just translated the plan to metric and started building, I still have to buy some parts to make it work, but all the wood work is done.