Lego Fix

 The weather finally cleared enough for us to make a trip into the Bay Area. This is our once a month a trip to see friends, do some shopping and search for bricks.  Hereaare  some pictures of what I got.  They are in the tub ready for washing.  Most of what I found are technic bricks  that I need for building infrastructure for  the space base.

 

 

 

 

Entrance Design - Part 3

 

Part of the complete rebuild of the Space Base is to improve the setup and take down without having to worry about small wires.  It started this in this post.   Since there are a lot of modules in front of the entrance, I added two of these (next picture), one  on either side.  The version is a little different in that there are three connectors on the front, but no connector on the back.  I soldered in wires that connect back to the main distribution point. 

The distribution point is shown in this picture. It is attached underneath the Entrance and connects all lighting in the Entrance structure to a USB port.

This ides went rough several iterations before I achieved a usable solution.

First it needed to be recessed so that there was sufficient room for the wire bend radius.  But if I did that, I would be guessing at where the connection point was.  That led to the idea of a removal module that I could easily connect the individual cables to .  This picture above shows this.  A single technic pin brick makes the connection.

This series of pictures shows the build.  The 1x3 tile area in front is a gripping point for removing the module.  The tiles on top help it slid in and not have studs tying to slide by tubes.  

This picture shows the socket area of the module.  A1x2 technic brick with a single hole is the socket for the previously mentioned technic brick with a pin. There is a 1x1 hole for the wire to slide through.

Finally the above picture shows the module attached and hanging on it's wire. The Distribution module can be seen at the back on the right.  

Only a live setup is going to tell me if this was a good idea.  So until Brick Days in Omaha, we will not know if this was a good idea.

See you on April 22.😀

 

 

 

Entrance Design - Part 2

Lighting design was a challenge.  The easy part was the conference room, which needed only white light.  The briefing room was done in red.  The third floor area was done in blue to match the transparent light blue windows.  Finally the two side areas that over see the hanger floor were done in white.  Here are the pictures.  First the conference room.

Next is the briefing room.  The red is really bright.

PIC18F46Q71 and I2C

I have been caught up in an I2C nightmare most of the week.  Basically a few years ago Microchip change their implementation of the I2C controller.  Instead of the MSSP which did both SPI and I2C, they now have separate SPI and I2C controllers.  Now it is true that the MSSP probably did not give as much control over the protocol process as one would like.  I am sure the MSSP worked great with all of Microhip's I2C products.  But as with any "specification" it is subject to interpretation, which probably led to a less than ideal mating with other companies products.  The new controller has more settings for SMBUS which is slightly different than I2C in timing and voltage levels.  And it has a more automated mode of working.  It may be better and more flexible. I dont know.  It wasn't that easy to get working in the master state. 

But the PICs I am moving to have this new controller.  There are very few working examples and the firmware that the MCC generator gives you is buggy and hard to understand how to actually implement. It is mostly a cooperative multi-tasking implementation with switch statements and lots of function calls to set one bit in a register.  Now I2C was never straight forward as a protocol, but the MCC code seems to make it more complex than it needs to be.  Sometimes you just want to read an external EEPROM memory and do a simple task.  Not have 10 peripherals running that need to be serviced on a regular basis.

What I found when searching the Internet for working example code was this example on a PIC18F46K42 and a Curiosity HPC.  Since I was working on an HPC this was perfect.  I downloaded the project and started working.  Using my Digilent Analog Discovery 2 as an I2C protocol analyzer, I could see when it worked and when it didn't.   Then I used the driver (.c) and header (.h) files as the starting point for my driver/header files.  Kept modifying these files in the example project until I could read and write the I2C EEPROM I had installed in one of the Click Module sockets on the HPC.  At this point I moved the files back to my project and the PIC18F46Q71 and started testing.  Some minor tweaks to the initialization were needed, but it seemed to work just fine.  

The I2C driver I have running is very basic and runs to completion.  That is it is blocking and will hang the system.  But for now that is OK.  I will need to implement some form of cooperative multi-taksing to get the LP5569 to work, since that is the way it is setup right now.   My only issus is when reading the EEPROM.  The sequence is to write the client address followed by the two bytes that hold the memory address.  this is followed by a restart condition and the PIC resends the client address with read set and starts reading the memory.  Here is the protocol analyzer's view of that sequence.

and just the restart area

The data sheet implies this is OK.  The stop bit is not long enough and all the client IC sees is the restart condition.  We shall see.

 I will leave with this comment form another developer, which was pretty typical of those who posted.

"When you make it hard to use your products, developers will move to other products."

Entrance Design - Part 1

When I first built this Space Base, the design was of a concave setup.  The Entrance was farthest away from the edge of the table and was only dominate because of the large tower structure on top.  Over time it has changed, especially since I decided to change the overall setup to convex.  These next three pictures show the evolution of the entrance.

The second picture shows the beginning of the cliff walls being attached.   The last picture shows the major change I made just prior to the Brick Days event in Omaha.  I built the beginnings of a large entry structure with doors with the Blacktron Logo on them.  It was very simple and very little detail.  But it needed a lot more than what was there.  This post will describe what all is entailed in the entrance design.

This is a view from the back.  You can see the back of the doors .  On the second level is the beginning of two large rooms, one on either side.  

The next set of pictures show the construction of the conference room.  Here parts of the flooring are in place.  The legs for the tables done. I used two 1x1 plates and one 1x1 round brick for the legs.  The jumper plates are for the table chairs and a place for a minifigure to stand.

This has a large table and seating for seven. 

Here the last of the transparent light blue walls are in place.

This shows the final detail of the conference room.  All the attendees are in place.  The video monitor is installed on the left and there is a guard. 

What is missing?  Well the tan wall on the right is bare, there could be something there.  There is not any room for Lego parts, so it would have to be a sticker depicting a map or the station layout.  There could be items on the table, but anything that would attach to a stud would be too large.  You could put the 1x2 cheese slopes with stickers on them to show video screens.  

This picture shows the beginnings of the briefing room.  There are chairs for nine members plus the briefers.  There is also a video screen installed.

Now you can see the desk in the back of the briefing room.

This gives a different perspective.  Here we can see the podium and the briefer with his pointer. 

What the above picture also shows, along with this one below, is the start of the third floor. 

This shows the third floor complete.  There are desks on either side with laptop computers on each.  The center area has three personnel standing watch over the entrance with a control panel.

This is what the current version looks like.

 

I still see changed coming for this.  Behind the columns on the left and right, were intended to be large power generators, like the Warp Core generators in Star Trek.  This still has to be done along with some minor updates to the color scheme.

LED lighting has been added and will be discussed in Part 3.

Platform Connectors with a Variable Angle

 

I found this in a brick pile years ago.  After examining it for a few days, it spawned the idea of the space base.  The idea that I could slowly bend independent modules in a curve was very intriguing.  I discussed this idea in multiple posts, here, here, and here.  I only had two angles and I was hoping that when the curve got to the 90 degree point it would be perpendicular with the front.  But as you can see that did not happen.  This was going to make any cliff wall behind these modules more difficult.  It was already not going to be easy and this just dramatically increased the difficulty factor.

Thus I started out trying to design a sort of variable platform connector.  I started out with the basic connection which is just two wedges and a hinge plate.

I used the 12 x 3 wedge plate because I knew the larger width wedge plates (6 x 3 and 8 x 3) would have to large of a minimum angle.  That would place the module beyond the 90 degree point.

Then I slowly move the module to the 90 degree point and lock it down so it wont move.

This shows the opening of the two wedge plates.

The next step is to find a position for the front hinge plate to connect.  Ideally you want to use the position with three studs in the row, but you can move up one row to the first row with two studs in it.

As you can see neither of these opens the connector enough to achieve the 90 degree setting I want.

Next step is to add a 1 x 2 plate to extend the hinge plate.

This will open up the angle as we see here.

But that is too much angle.  I moved the module to the correct position, but that puts the hinge plate in an undesirable position.  Also the hinge plate is rotating on the single stud connection to the 1 x 2 plate.

I changed out the 1 x 2 plate for a 1 x 3 plate, that at least keeps the hinge plate from rotating on the extension plates.  But the entire hinge plate is still not in a good position.

Now I moved up one row

This is very close, but there is only one stud on each wedge plate.  I need a more stable connection and to verify that this will be where I want the module.   So I swapped out the 1 x 3 plate for a 1 x 4 plate.  This grabs the hinge plate with two studs and grabs the two studs on the wedge plate.

This has the hinge plate in a buildable position and places the module very near the 90 degree point.  

Now I can build the detail that will cover the two (one on each side) platform connectors.