SALSA To The Rescue!

Here’s the Spinner Assembly Locking Stabilization Arm.

It prevents the spinner assembly from coming off the top of the paddle knob under normal circumstances.  Under extreme cases (such as reaching the extreme edge of the potentiometer range of the knob), the spinner will push itself off anyway.  This arm can swing out of the way when inserting or removing the paddle, then it locks into place.  So far, it works well.

Of course, letting it run for as long as I did to test out the arm revealed another problem.  The paddle wildly thrashes about, causing the entire robot to dance.  I may need to install inertial dampeners on the paddle to prevent the whole thing from dancing off a table.  Even if it doesn’t pirouette to destruction, the stresses from repeatedly bashing the paddle into the beams may eventually cause a catastrophic structural failure.

I just hope I’m recording it when that happens.