[Ground-station] Open Rotator - mechanical engineering meeting notes and plan

[Michelle Thompson]

I hired a local open source robotics designer to go over our JAMSAT
collaboration. This is a heavy-duty automated AZ-EL tracking station
capable of LEO to Gateway. We fully intend for integration with SatNOGs.
The demonstration is expected to be at Tokyo Ham Fair 2020.

Our engineering consultant’s name is James Newton. You may recognize him as
2018 Hackaday Superconference prize winner. He’s very active in the San
Diego Maker Movement. I’ve volunteered with him at events for 7 years.

All of his engineering solutions for motor control are open source and are
ready to go. He anticipates no further charges for his time, and is ready
to help integrate his work for our prototype. I paid him out of pocket. No
ORI money was used.

What do we need to do to get to the prototype for demonstration?

The sequence proposed moving forward:
- Collect as many as possible dish data sheets with weight and mounting
pattern to try to find commonalities.
- Purchase / "procure" a "2 meter" (6 foot) diameter dish for local
development. If Doug Phelps can send me all the remaining 2m dishes, then I
will take them for prototype stations.
- Pay for mechanical design of mount for common dish support maximum scope
of commonly available dishes
- Fabrication / adjustment of mount locally. Hopefully it can be welded
using alignment "tricks" to keep the bearings right.
- Attachment of actuators to axis (steppers / DC motors). Possible further
mechanical design.
- Attachment of encoder system  (James to lead)
- Drive / servo controller / motion control electronics (James to lead)
- Interfacing with existing control system (This is us)

the first step is to gather data on the mechanical aspects of the target
antennas; weight and mounting bolt pattern. The consensus from the local
microwave and EME people is a pipe will be best.

The mechanical designer doing the CAD (recommended by James) needs to know
how fast they needed to move and how much load they would take from the
wind. That last one is probably tricky to find out, but maybe we can
prototype a solid mount and attach some strain gages to a data logger if we
can’t find out from existing sources.

Got answers, questions, feedback? Let’s hear it!

-Michelle W5NYV


-- 
-Michelle W5NYV

"Potestatem obscuri lateris nescis."
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