Thank you for the kind words everyone..
I had a couple of small snags I needed to solve. The biggest was too much backlash on the arms..
This thing is going to be going up and down at quite a pace so needed something sturdy to help dampen out some of the wobble.
I welded two 5mm square bits of steel to the back of my main tube..
Then I added a machined brass runner into each gun pod..
The square steel will run in them and help mitigate the wobble from all that leverage of the gun pods/ arms etc..
I had to then start designing the tilt mech..
This has a motor that rotates the whole extension arm. There is an encoder geared directly to the extension mech too..
This rotates a magnet, which pulses a Hall effect sensor in the encoder and lets my Arduino know what rotational position my arm is in.
I linked it up to a basic joystick and tested it out..
I am currently using the PID Arduino library to control the movement.
With an arm on...
The steel and brass runner really help reduce the wobble and I can reduce it further in software by introducing a curve to the movement so it slows down when needing to stop.
The aiming will eventually be controlled autonomously by a Pixy2 camera, which I should be able to train to shoot at particular objects.
The next update will hopefully include the use mechanism, which means designing the main body too. Id also like to see tilt, yaw and extension all on display!!
Thanks for looking!