I am back I now have a design goal. Nasa has posted a 250K prize for essentially a robotic way station capable of cracking 10kg of O2 out of lunar regolith and having it handy for wayward lunar suit occupants or explorers.

Centennial Challenge Lunox

I will be at least prototyping a robot to accomplish prior to beginning the engineering necessary to achieve weight, power, and time constraints on the winning system. Even if I do not win (and I must consider myself a dark horse) I will learn a lot that will be of great use to production lunox operators and lunar colonists resulting from huge success with the CRV.

I will establish a formal project here and start posting Process and Instrumentation Diagrams and protographs of the conceptual prototypes as I get them layed out in the carport or down on paper. This is going to be a lot of fun!

Incidentally, I am grateful that this site has been developed by Steven Rainwater, et. al. and all of you readers while I have been goofing off elsewhere on the internet. This site is going to be incredibly useful as I start serious prototyping and soldering necessary to integrate the off-the-shelf and custom components of my Lunox Waystation Wanderor ... LW^2? ... I will need to work on a good acronym. Even if I do not win the prize, I might be able to sell some solid engineering to somebody contracting to NASA in a decade or two?

Anyway I am off to read the recentlog, scan the local site, go gambling with my Dad for Father's day and finish my post at Advogato (which now has a pointer to here). Later