Yeah, so the Xmas deadline came and went and the machine ain't near done yet. Doh!

Mostly, I ran out of time with the festive season crashing my spare moments. Although the root cause was actually a lack of progress MONTHS AGO. And so the project's critical path to completion (if it had a Gantt chart) became simply unachievable in the planned time-frame. No amount of additional resource allocation would have overcome the situation.

And, tbh, I'm quite enjoying the pondering aspect of this late-stage build phase so "time taken" is less of a concern than it was. Up to recently, I've pretty much just followed the solid, public-domain Sawppy recipe as laid down by @Roger. So the foundations of the machine are good. Now I'm wandering through the final electrical / mechanical build.

Generally, I'm not one to go with my first thought on anything - my first thought is rarely my best thought and quite often it's just someone else's thought anyways. Thus I'm happy to drop in and out of things, thinking hard and then dropping it, waiting for inspiration to strike. Dangerously close to procrastination, admittedly, but it works for me. My professional life abounds in hard deliverables, deadlines & budgets, so the stretchable slack in personal projects is a precious commodity.

OK, so quit rambling...

Progress has been on the wiring harness and tweaking the design of the official power unit.

Harness: In a nutshell, I deconstructed, chopped, spliced, soldered, heat-shrunk & rebuilt the three metres of triple-stranded wiring that came with the LX-16 servos to create the compact, neat, tidy shape I wanted. I've already used up all of the supplied wire, so I've had to order some more to finish, but that's OK. Our good friends at AliExpress will deliver the four additional link wires shortly.

The harness I've cobbled together mostly hides neatly in the offside channel of the 1515 extrusion with the help of some printed clips that I knocked up in OnShape.

So I'm stoked with the loom / harness.

On the power unit, I've decided that regardless of anything else that I might decide to do with the rover, the power unit will likely remain as it is so I'm doing my own optimised version. Thus, I have hacked, almost-complete versions of the standard battery tray and power panel sitting in OnShape. Design tweaks are around neatness / tidiness of wiring again. Some more pondering still to do ;)

So, yeah progress is slower than originally planned, but that's because I've decided (belatedly) to row my boat gently down the stream rather than be in too much of a hurry :)