Friday, August 10, 2018

What we bought - July 2018

We often get asked what we purchase to prepare for the season, etc. So we thought we would run down some of our July 2018 purchases.



WEN 3410 3-Speed Remote-Controlled Air Filtration System

This was added to go along with our laser cutter to cut down on some of the smells from cutter plastic and wood on the laser cutter. It should also help with some of the 3D printer fumes and the general dust that is generated in the lab.





IWISS Crimping Tools for Dupont
We needed a new crimping tool for crimping PWM connectors and the latching PWM connectors that we use for our CAN cables. This seemed to get very good reviews and was reasonably priced. 





We need some extra countersinks and this set seemed go enough for what need it for. A few different sizes and enough that we can some lend them out or lose some and not worry about it.










Mophorn 1800W Electric Brushless DC Motor Kit 48V
This one isn't FRC related at all. The plan for this is to start testing it for using it for the Power Wheel Racing Series. The idea is to build a couple small Go-Karts as a fall project to prepare the team for building FRC robots. We can use a lot of the same build techniques that we need for FRC in a fun way.

OTG Safety Glasses and Cleaning Wipes
Just some restock for the coming the year.





Fire HD 8 TabletWe already mentioned these in a previous post but we bought Fire HD 8s to use for scouting next season.

We also purchased a USB Charger Station for that them as well.





Aibecy Intelligent Biometric Fingerprint Password Attendance Machine
Simple way to keep track of team hours. It has a learning curve but we were able to get all the names loaded in and then start loading finger prints. We also made a quick google sheet to take the text file we can download off the machine and view everyone's hours. You do have to pull the data off with a thumb drive every time.




TinaWood SSR-40DA 40A Solid State Relay DC to AC 40A
This is for a project that will likely get it's own blog post. We converted the heated bed on our Airwolf 3D printer to us an AC Heater. That lets us dramatically reduce the time it needs to heat up letting us print parts faster.
A couple other items from that project 
5 PCS SF214E SEFUSE Thermal Cutoffs
10 Amp Glass Fast Blow fuses 5 X 20MM



We want to be able to have better photos and also back grounds for when we do event casts. So we purchased.
- LimoStudio 10Ft Adjustable Backdrop Support System Stand
- Green Screen
- White Screen
- Black Screen








Gigabyte Geforce GTX 1050 Ti OC Low Profile
The computer we use for streaming events and sometimes for CAD work needed a new graphics card. It's in a low profile rack mount case so we went with a Geforce 1050 TI low profile. It's enough power for what we need at a reasonable price, we got it as an Amazon Warehouse deal which are normally just damaged packaging or returned items but usually work well. 




Aurum Ultra Series - High Speed HDMI Cable (50 Ft)
At some point this year we lost our other two 50ft HDMI cables so we needed to get replacements at around $20 each these seemed like a good price for a well reviewed cable.




DJI osmo mobile 2 Handheld Smartphone Gimbal
We have had some issues with shaky video footage in the past and wanted to help solve that. The DJI gimbal is pretty cheap and with the quality of smart phone video now its easy enough to use one instead of a DSLR on a stabilizer or a much more expensive gimbal. 





CORSAIR VOID PRO RGB USB Gaming Headset
These will be used when we have commentators on live streams or when doing any other skype calls or shows. Also used for recording voice overs.


- Spectrum