We did it. The MK12 lives!! (fwd)

[E M Rogers]

As some of you will know, we managed to complete the Canute Mk12 in the
nick of time last month. What follows is a note from one of the
engineers involved, Russ Couper, immediately after completion. Excuse
the delay in forwarding it on.

Since the 10th things have been comparatively slow in hardware
development as we've been focusing on demonstrations in the NFB (audio
diary to follow shortly), Sight Village Brum and various London
locations. We have also made great strides in the user interface, which
Steph Sergeant is planning on testing with Braillists members on the
10th of this month.

Russ' message follows;

Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2017 16:03:25

We got the MK12 Demo together and working in time for Ed to get into a taxi for
the airport with it this morning.

It was an epic week of everything coming together at the very last moment which
has been a far more satisfying process than any of the previous sprint
deadlines has ever been. The 3D designs, circuit boards, motors and internal
parts all slotted and clipped together in a way the previous iterations of the
machine has not done. I think I speak for all the engineers involved that apart
from the rush it has been a joy to finally assemble and work with it after all
the months of design and development that has gone into the MK12. It is
noteworthy to say that there was very little post assembly fettling needed on
the mechanics such as rotors, ribs and nut couplings etc which in the past took
many days of investigation and prodding before recognisable braille could be
displayed at all. This indicates we learned and then implemented corrective
action from the MK11 very well indeed. For comparison, and on initial
inspection as we had no time for extended tests, the MK12 appears to work
better out-of-the-box ie with little to no fettling, than the MK11 and previous
editions ever did at their best and that was after more than a whole week of
fettling and adjusting them.

It has been a week or more of late nights with midnight finishes for some of us
followed by an epic weekend of progressively later evenings until we worked
right through until 5am today as we were chasing down a rather nasty surprise
internal power conversion problem that exposed its self earlier in the previous
morning of the same working day.

Regards

Russ.