Getting ready to wire up

So now that the legs are on, it's time to thin about the foot drives. I've been working to get those fastened together, and finally got that done Saturday morning. Pictured here is a foot drive with the rear caster mounted and the ankle mount clamped on:

Now I've got to wire up the actual drives. I grabbed some sheet aluminum the other day and cut it to 6x7 inches so that it would mount inside of the leg braces on the frame. Since the motor driver is too big to fit on my current motherboard I'm breaking it off by itself. And since it's got a big heat sink on the bottom of it I went with a conductive base attached directly to the aluminum frame. Here is the driver--a Sabertooth 2x32 (2 motors & 32A each) mounted to the plate:

And here's the plate mounted inside the leg brace:

Pretty exciting. Hopefully the center ankle hardware will show up very soon, and I can get that done. In the meantime, I had a little side project over at Hammerspace this weekend, where one of our members is doing a two-part class on building lightsabers. He brought in a whole bunch of plumbing parts and whatnot, and we put them together however we liked. I took mine home for a little painting and touchup work, and this is the result:

Next class, hes' going to show us how to add sound effects, and make it compatible with the popular "blades" available out there. Very cool. I'm thinking I'm going to have to make some of these for gifts for my geeky friends.

Incidentally: this weekend marks not only Star Wars Celebration VII (wish I was there!), but also month 4 of this build. I now am 1/3 of the way through my projected build tome to get R2 up and running. I do believe I'm more than a third of the way through the build too, so feeling pretty good about that. Will I make it? Hope so. But we shall have to see.