The main project I've been focusing on recently is Drop Test, my 1lb Antweight spring flipper. If you scroll down far enough you can find the post where I was hoping to have Drop Test ready for Smashbotz 2021. That did not happen, for a lot of reasons I'll try to cover quickly in this post.
What Was Wrong with Drop Test
The first thing that was wrong with the original design was the concept of the 3D printed unibody. This was a concept I had from the original version of Drop Test that I wanted to improve on for the second version. The original frame was pretty weak because it was so light weight given how heavy the flipper mechanism was. I knew I could do it better for the second version. And I did, sort of. The problem was, at the time, I did not have my own 3D printer. So I was paying online services to do it for me. This got very expensive very quickly when I would print large unibody frames. Attempt to use them. Realize they wouldn't work for one reason or another, then have to wait a couple weeks to do the whole cycle again. Very frustrating experience overall.
I have since purchased my own 3D printer, and created an enclosure and dry box for it to print nylon at home. This meant I could iterate on my own quickly and cheaply. Unfortunately, this meant I also had to deal with my own design issues. The original design used a lot of support and took forever to print, leading to some big failures. Between the difficulty in manufacturing and the difficulty in assembly, I moved away from the unibody in favor of 4, smaller, more printable, frame rails.
That's when I had my big breakthrough find. This 5 Turn, High torque servo was exactly what I was trying to build in an off the shelf product. This servo was brand new and I had to have it. It's designed to go in Servo City's servo gearboxes which is almost exactly what I'm building here. It allows for servo control of the trigger over a large enough range of motion to be effective after the additional gear reduction. Best of all, it weighed the same as the custom setup I was making, but in a smaller package.