Servo Adventures

[Tom Droege <droege@wwa.com>]

Ahhh!  The joys of production.  I just hate fussing with parts orders and
such.  They discontinued the servo motor I was using for a shutter.  The
model airplane business does not seem to care much about dimensions.  When
I call the catalog house they have no idea what the dimensions between the
mounting holes are.  So I have had to just order one and measure it when it
gets here.  On the third try, I found one that fit.  So I ordered 10 more
to catch up the camera production.  When these arrived, they did not fit.
It turns out, that they had previously sent me a part in a box that did not
belong to it.  Sigh!  So now I have to send those back and hope the next
batch is what I ordered.  

Meanwhile I took 3 Gb of bad data last night.  I came home from the opera
(Carmen in a new production at Lyric Oper of Chicago, just great!) and the
sky was clear so I tried to run.  Being pretty tired, I did not do a check
run after setting the focus.  Something has moved after changing out the
cameras, so I have good V data, but the I data is out of focus.  Possibly I
will have better luck tonight. 

The temperatures were quite solid on both channels.  No more than a couple
of tenths of a C over the night.  So either there is something wrong with
the N7 camera, or there was a loose connection that I fixed changing out
cameras.  I observe that the cables and connections on TOM have been much
abused as I checked it out and made many changes.  It needs to be
completely towrn down and rewired.  I will do that when I move it to its
new dome home.

Mostly things keep working when I do not change something.  

Tom Droege