I had access to a laser cutter and made and sold the skins covering the body out of PVC. Another member from Canada was a professional resin caster and he sold cast resin parts. We found one member who had access to a metal spinner and he then sold the spun aluminum domes. He then posted what he had and sold all of them to other members. We had a builder down there so I coordinated with him to go to the bone yard and pull all the lights. I searched old aircraft bone yards for over 6 months and finally found several planes in Brownsville, Texas. For example, I found the original holo-projectors were passenger reading lights from a particular version of Boeing 727 aircraft no longer in service. Our goal was to help others build R2D2s, not make money. We utilized out team building efforts actoss the globe and members who had a skill or access to a product sold those items at minimal cost to others in the group. When I left the dream we had over 5,000 R2D2 builders as members. Soon there were people from all over the world joining with the same dream. I joined up with another gentleman, Dave, from Australia, and we formed the R2D2 Builders group on Yahoo. Some 15-20 years ago, I too was bitten by the bug.

I am excited that young people want to build R2D2s. Therefore, having the motor current at 0 allows me to physically rotate the dome to the desired start position so the dome can have any home (0) position desired. When a show is started, I set the position to 0 via a software command, this is like a manual home of the dome. To reduce current when the motor is not turning and to allow manual positioning of the dome before a sequence starts, I have configured the motor to have no idle current 2 seconds after the last move. Since I am using the STP-MTR-34066 stepper motor, the PSB24-120 power supply was utilized that you can also be purchased from. The stepper drive requires a power supply to provide power to the drive and the motor circuit.

The following text commands must be sent one time during the initial communication between the drive and the PLC. What I discovered is that there a few undocumented commands that must be initially sent that make the communication work every time. To figure this out, I connected the drive to the software tool and monitored the communications between the software and the drive. I discovered that the PLC will not always communicate to the stepper drive after a PLC power up was initiated but it would always talk via the software tool for the drive. The PLC sends commands to the stepper drive such as position, velocity, accel, and decel. The stepper drive is connected to the Allen-Bradley MicroLogix 1400 PLC via a serial cable that comes with the stepper drive. The stepper drive is an AutomationDirect STP-DRV-4850 that is connected to an AutomationDirect STP-MTR-34066 stepper motor. The dome rotation is controlled via a stepper motor connected to a stepper drive.

How to mod r2d2