Electromechanical Sunglasses IX

Had a very productive day today. I finally drilled and tapped the mounting holes for the ear-pieces. Was able to tap all 4 blind holes at #1-64 without any problems, yay! (Had I broken a tap in the process, it could have meant starting over on the frames.) I cut some prototype ear-pieces out of sheet metal and screwed them on. The sunglasses are complete glasses finally! On a roll, I figured out a simple driveshaft for connecting the servo, using some 1/4" brass tubing I had, and crudely mounted the servo with zipties. It worked! This is the first time I've been able to have the electro and the mechanical all working together. I also used a dremel cutoff disk to cut a rabbet in one of the nylon lens gears, and successfully fit a circular piece of polarizing film into it. Very happy that is going to work. I haven't begun to cut out the new brass gears or even address their poor fit, so I'll have to come back to that.

Tomorrow I hope to get some real ear-pieces cut out of the nicer sheet metal, and a real servo mounting devised. I'll get some pictures up at that point, I promise.

I also worked on the LASER MEDUSA HELMET some. Finally measured the current draw on my laser modules: 42 mA. Higher than I would have liked, but not a problem. It does mean I'll have to throw together a switching circuit for the tilt sensors, since they max out at ~10 mA, but that's easy enough. I also drilled the mounting plate and screwed on the 12 modules ready to go. It is... appropriately ridiculous looking. I'm still giggling.



Not a lot of work left on this one, really. Need to make the bus bars for the terminal strips I picked up, add the power switch and mount the whole thing to the hardhat, leaving room for the tilt sensor circuit once those arrive.

So, yeah, pretty nice day.