Category: Announcements

DOMO Lives!

After two days of code wrangling, two snapped electrical cables, one crash into the goniometer, and several reconfigurations of the force sensor and gripper arms DOMO is alive. On Friday afternoon DOMO mounted its first sample successfully. There is still much work that needs to be done and many bugs to be ironed out, but…
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Domo Arigato, Mr Roboto

The new PX automated sample mounting robot shall henceforth be known as “DOMO” as in Domo Arigato. Mr Roboto. It’s short and catchy, but isn’t really an acronym for anything… yet DOMO Doer Of Mechanized Operations? or Dolt whO follows My Orders? I think beer will be given to the person who comes up with…
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Sample Dewar take one

Being the brave souls that we are we thought we would attempt to make a sample dewar without a lid. Our main concern is ice. We are concerned with the build up of ice around the rim of the dewar, but more important is the prevention of ice accumulating in the liquid nitrogen in the…
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the Sample Dewar actually fits

The Aluminum sample dewar enclosure actually fits. I guess you have to trust the 3D CAD drawings after all.

Epson arm finally installed!

Well it’s finally in. Kurt and I (actually it was mostly Kurt) worked on this most Monday and Tuesday. I had a bit of a freak out when we first bolted the arm onto the bracket. It really looked like it wasn’t going to fit. However, I was greatly relieved when we unfolded the arm…
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New CCD_Z motor and gearbox

In order to make room for the Epson robot arm we replaced the straight motor/gearbox combo with a 90º gearbox and equivalent motor. BEFORE: AFTER:

Dewar Stand Installed

The stand to hold the LN2 sample dispensing dewar was installed on Monday of this week. It’s that shiny black post in the middle of the picture.

upgrading BLU-ICE from release 3.0 to 4.5

The last few days I have been primarily focussed on getting the latest BLU-ICE (version 4.5) control software running on our graphics1 computer. I have documented the process fairly well so when all is said and done I should be able to write a back-from-the-dead script so we can go from a bare machine to…
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