Today was one of those days where you say to yourself “I think I’m going to do X”, and then you realize that there are three other things to do before you can actually get to X. So instead I worked on a few things that needed to get done.
First was trimming the hatch so that it was no longer rubbing on the afterburner (results shown in the picture above). This had to be adjusted because of the repositioning in order to move the afterburner higher for more ground clearance.
Just a quick update for today. I spent an hour or so installing some hub guards on my BMX. Grinding rails at the skatepark was starting to gnarl up my hubs. After I was finished with my bike, I finished off the two remaining exhaust tip inserts.
After we did the rudimentary work on the BatBerry software that was connected to the Arduino board, I did a re-design of the interface using the Cascades native technology for my BlackBerry Smartphone.
The above screen shots show six different screens/states of the application where you can choose the system you wish to control from a dropdown and then select the buttons on the toolbar to perform the desired actions.
After realizing just how heavy my afterburner has become with the speaker enclosure + speaker inside of it, I’ve been getting worried about the strength of the existing mounting point on the chassis. Right now it’s fabricated out of plywood that eventually will be covered in fiberglass.
Today I had a couple of hours to tinker in the garage. I started off looking at creating Y-pipes for the back of the exhaust tips, but then realized it would both be easier to create the inserts for the tips with out the Y-pipe attached and I also didn’t have the right materials for the Y-pipes.
So I quickly moved on to seeing if I could make the little inserts that go in the end of the exhaust tips. I started off by tracing a pattern on some plywood so that I had a template to work from. I then cut some strips that would fit with the template and welded them onto the tube that I “created” from some threaded electrical tube.
After yesterday’s first attempt on my exhaust tips I decided I would correct the inaccuracies. I knew that they would just bug me every time I looked at them even though no one else would ever notice. Of course I first cleared my head by spending the morning at the skatepark again 🙂
So I started by trimming the curved end to be more like the ones on the actual car. It’s a shame to see all that welding and finish work go to waste, but my peace of mind is worth more and they actually turned out great!
It was such a beautiful day yesterday I had to make sure I did two things. First head to the skatepark on my BMX to have a couple hours of fun with my daughter on her freestyle scooter. Second was to do some work on the BatBerry.
As I’m finishing up all the fabrication work connected to the chassis, one of the items on the list was to finish up the exhaust tips and their mounting plate. As seen in the above photo, they’re currently just temporarily mounted to a piece of wood that I painted while I was painting some other things in my bronze accent color. But I got to thinking that I “might” be able to use them as functional exhaust tips.
Building The BatBerry 