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

[Michelle Thompson]

Found an experienced local machinist that is enthusiastic about working for
the team and is willing to work at a discount. He is fully booked in the
summer but has time during the rest of the year.

-Michelle W5NYV




On Sat, Dec 7, 2019 at 8:52 AM Michelle Thompson <
mountain.michelle at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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