More photos of my droid building hobby 😁

This photo includes Matt Denton, the electronics wizard behind "The Force Awakens" BB-8 animatronics in the middle.
Matt Denton autograph on my BB-8 dome - plus his binary encoded BB8 signature
I packed my R2-D2 and BB-8 in our Honda Fit for the trip to Celebration Orlando 2017
My R2-D2 and my BB-8 trapped with a net

Proud builder with his droids

The droid builders room had several great photo op booths

Don't miss the Droid Races at the convention

Sean Shaffer (my grandson), droid builder (I need to find his name), and Monty as 'Luke' at the convention.
Cosplay 'Rey' with my BB-8
Young-ling Jedi with my BB-8
Houston Area Droid Builders - first meeting in summer of 2017
Houston Area Droid Builders - Facebook link

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tektronix 4051 / 4052 / 4054 Computers

Image
I got my first personal computer experience using a Tektronix 4051 vector graphics computer at my first job in the USAF in the late 1970s.  I learned to write program in Tektronix 4050 BASIC and developed several programs for the USAF to automate high-speed training film data capture displaying the film on a large digitizing tablet and plotting the results to match a mainframe computer using used by our contractor to plot results on a Calcomp plotter. I also ported many game programs from magazines like Byte to the Tektronix 4051.  I discovered through a tip from the Tektronix sales engineer how to call an assembly language program from Tektronix BASIC - and wrote a couple of assembly language programs to play music and draw text and graphics. After I retired (the first time - I'm back at work now) I purchased a Tektronix 4052 and a 4054 - see photo below.  The 4052 came with a custom cabinet plus the hard copy unit.  I purchased the 4054 for $17 AS-IS not working,...
Read more

My first job was in the US Air Force

Image
  My first job after graduating from Texas A&M University was as a Lieutenant in the US Air Force in Los Angeles, California at Los Angeles Air Force Base. I was the headquarters engineer responsible for the recovery equipment in a top-secret program that is now declassified - to recover spy satellite film capsules using a fleet of C-130 aircraft and HH-53 helicopters based in Hawaii. These USAF HH-53 helicopters and USAF naval ships were also responsible for recovering all the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts after their space capsule parachuted into the Pacific Ocean. In the photo below - you can see a C-130 recovering a 'small' 200 pound test capsule, and a second photo recovering a 1000 pound test capsule suspended from a much larger parachute. I encouraged the USAF to purchase a Tektronix 4051 Computer in 1977, soon after it was introduced and used it to develop programs to simplify and speed-up the process of analyzing high speed movie film of training of...
Read more

Monty's BB-8

Image
I've been working on my BB-8 this past year. I purchased an Ultimaker 2 3D printer to print the body panels and dome as shown in the next photo: , and have also purchased many ServoCity ( https://www.ServoCity.com )  parts including their Actobotics round baseplate shown in the next photo - as the hub to support my pendulum drive design.  Other ServoCity mechanical parts I have purchased include bearings and thrust washers for the differential gearbox in the center of the last photo.  Now it is time to order some servo motors with the powerful ServoCity servo gearboxes - which I will use to move the dome gimbals and rotate the dome from the body - using an array of magnets shown in the magnet mount at the top of the next picture. Here is my Autodesk 123d design for my pendulum drive - you can see a ServoCity ServoBlock at the top of the picture to rotate the dome (through magnets located in the 3D printed magnet holder: Many thanks to the BB-8 Builder...
Read more