Very much still working on this! And I know, completely terrible for a total derth of posts
In the time I've been quiet we've welcomed into the world my beautiful little girl, Kaylee just at the end of December. With that, I had to rejoin the work force as my wife is on maternity leave. That's kept me busy since then. Before that, I was making progress but it was slow and frustrating, making it a bit difficult to write about... nothing.
However, I have managed to cover off a number of frustrating road blocks now that I have steady access to mechanical engineers at work who are happy to trade time on personal projects. First, I have a stand design that I'm very happy with that is both supportive and adjustable. This has always been a point of extreme frustration as the adjustable & modular nature of Axios has prevented what should be standard and easy support designs from working out. Second, I have finally been able to source the pins I've been wanting to use to make the arm mounts so that you won't have to take cases apart to reconnect cables. I'm very, very happy with the results so far in testing, especially with a 100% consistency in the electrical connections between swapping parts out.
The other roadblock (or probably more accurately, personal hang up) is the information OLED display. I've been fighting with the design for the mount for awhile, as it felt rather wrong to have it in a fixed position in a design that is otherwise much more modular. As it stands, I'm going to let it go for now and mount it into a spot with the highest visibility, and use a display with the widest viewing angle I can find. If things go well with funding, we'll release it as an upgrade at cost for people who have bought into the first wave, and it'll become standard going forward from there.
The other upside to where I'm working now is spending my days doing mechanical and electrical design, which has greatly improved my skills and workflow, which has been trickling down into the final design of Axios. Happily this includes doing work with the bluetooth modules I've had specced for awhile now
So whats left? The big hold up right now is strengthening the case designs. Right now, there is flex with the arm mounts and near the stand mounts that require proper ribbing to be designed for the case. If we were machining them, it'd be a non issue but with an injection molded design we have to design extra strength into the case to combat this. Thankfully I've been helping one of the engineers here with the electronics & coding in exchange for help using some of the software we have access to to do strength analysis and design the ribbing which should fix the problem.
After that's been dealt with, there are a couple of design revisions I need to make with the controller now that I've gotten a lot more experience under my belt and then we're done. Check back later tonight/tomorrow, I'll try to get photos up of what I've been working on in silence.
