They’ve made some appearances here and there on my website and others already, but if you haven’t seen them yet, now is the time that I’ll make them public. For a while, I’ve been sproadically making Hall Effect sensor “adapter boards” that can be mounted to R/C outrunners for sensored commutation uses, needed for most ground / vehicular applications. It’s about to get way less sporadic:

Yep, that’s a big cake of them to the left. I’ve also added sizes to the collection. Now, 80mm (“melon”) motors and 50mm outrunners are supported, also. I’m still a bit peeved that Hobbyking had to make their new SK3 “63″ motors actually 59mm in diameter, necessitating a fourth board design. These boards were sent to my usual slow-and-easy PCB house, MyroPCB, and done up in black.

Why 50mm? My general belief is that 50mm outrunners are about the smallest you can really use for a vehicle before they start getting too fast (Kv rating too high) to easily gear down. I foresee the 50mm motors being useful  more in scooters than anything else, where a low profile helps compared to the chubbier 63mm motors, unless your scooter is the size of a small bus.

But the other reason is that the Democratic People’s Republic of Chibikart (Hereafter known as just “chibikart” because why did I pick such a name?) uses them, and on a go-kart where pushing off with your leg is just ruining the point, sensors are pretty critical. I’ve been at a loss to explain how to add sensors to the motors because there is so much customization involved, so Chibikart was published without sensors, but with the sensor boards and attendant plastic ring things and automagically calibrating controllers, I think I’m getting pretty close to an “official solution”.

I’m confident enough in these little widgets to pitch them up on my eventual web store, Big Chuck’s Robot Emporium (d.b.a e0designs.com). Check out these pretty product pictures:

This stuff is getting too legit. I should still make you place orders in the comment thread.

Anyways, here’s what a 50mm SK3 rig looks like installed on Chibikart:

The rings are held in place by pressure from the motor mounting surface – it has to be flat bulkhead mounted, or mounted using the X-shaped plate that comes with these motors generally, to work. So, a setup like Straight RazEr which directly uses standoffs on the motor would not work with this design.

I used a chunk of ribbon cable that conveniently had blue, yellow, and green wires next to each other to make the connection to the board. Because everyone’s going to have different wiring arrangements, I’ll leave it as an exercise to the user to make their own cable harness.

Chibikart has actually been experiencing some technical difficulties recently, and I took this installation as a chance to tear the whole electrical system down and check everything. The symptom was severe battery voltage drop (seen on the motor controller side, after the switch and fuse), usually leading to the controllers dropping out during acceleration. Some times, it just wouldn’t even accelerate. I noticed this getting worse and worse recently.

I started the teardown by injecting a wattmeter between every load point – at the battery (checked out great), behind the fuse (terrible), and in front of the fuse but behind the main switch (also terrible). So the problem was clearly related to the big key switch. When I took apart the joint, the switch was fine, but the wire had corroded in its somewhat poorly crimped terminal!

With the problem found, I restripped and securely soldered that joint. I don’t really trust regular crimp type terminals, and this episode just reinforced my disdain, but they are popular enough that I can’t just get away from them.

Especially not on the batteries. I noticed one of the K2 bricks had a terminal which was clearly darkened from heat. But only one, and not even the one I cracked open. The heating signs may have indicated a bad connection, but I could find no corresponding contact blemishes on any of my connectors. It may have been there for a long time, like since before I adopted them.

Out of some caution, I replaced the K2 bricks with matching A123 bricks (which, despite A123′s slightly indeterminate state at the moment, will be restocked again, I’m told. Also, the lead image of the linked article is Chibikart 1′s battery. I am an amused hamster.)

 

Well, there was a problem. I’d given the Jasontrollers a ‘haircut’ to minimize the wiring mess, but that also entailed cutting off the Hall sensor inputs on them. Oops!

I was able to pull them out just far enough to solder to the wires, so I spliced on a new connector:

Protip: A 4S (4 cell) Lithium battery balance connector is basically a keyed 5 pin connector with wire pigtails attached.  It’s much easier to splice wires than to try and crimp and install these tiny connectors, or solder pin headers, in my opinion, so they might be the Recommended Solution for these sensor boards as a product. It took under 10 minutes to splice both sides, ribbon cable and Jasontroller stubs.

The final setup. Chibikart now has a little fluffy bunny tail made of unused Jasontroller wiring connectors, but in case I ever find that they are useful for something else, I won’t cut them off for now.

The process of tuning the controllers was extremely easy:

1. Line up one of the sensors with the dead center of a stator winding slot – this guarantees that the 120 electrical degree spacing square waves generated by the Halls have at least one edge that is the zero-radial-flux region  between 2 magnets.
2. Run the Magical Autotune routine of the Jasontrollers for each side. I decided to do it explicitly using the “self train” wire, but it was clear to me that one side had already picked it up when I was done “training” the other.

I’ll have to write this up officially for the product pages, but if the controller did not have Magical Autotune, the process is much more involved and painful, and for a known working set of 3 sensors it might go:

1. Line up one sensor with the dead center of a stator winding slot
2. Fix the Hall Sensor cable combination (for instance, Hall sensor signals [A,B,C] get connected to controller inputs, [A,B,C] for the resulting connection [AA,BB,CC]).
3. Label the controller phase wires (e.g. [u,v,w]) and the motor phase wires (e.g. [x,y,z])
4. Start with connecting the motor and controller phases in any combination (e.g. [ux,vy,wz]) and see if the motor turns. If it does not continously rotate (e.g. just wobbles, or moves a small amount and locks up), swap two wires. For instance, the example hookup might become [uy,vx,wz].
5. If the motor still does not turn, swap the two wires you didn’t swap before.  For instance, the example hookup might become [uy,vz,wx] after this point.
6. Repeat step 5, continuing to swap the 2 wires you didn’t swap before. There are 6 total ways to arrange 3 unique things with 3 other unique things (3 nPr 3). The example connections list might be
   1. [ux,wy,vz]
   2. [uy,wx,vz]
   3. [uy,wz,vx]
   4. [ux,wz,vy]
   5. [uz,wx,vy]
   6. [uz,wy,vx]
7. If none of the 6 combinations result in motor rotation, then you have to pick 2 Hall sensor wires to swap. For example. [AB,BA,CC]. Repeat step 5 through 6.
8. If the motor spins with a combination, but in the wrong directions, then cyclically shift the entire connection. For example, [ux,vy,wz] becomes [uz,vx,wy].
9. If the motor does not turn any more, cyclically shift one more time. At least one of the shifts will be rotation in the reverse direction. One more cyclic shift and you would arrive back at the first again.
10. Once rotation has been established, you must time the sensors correctly. This involves an AC or DC ammeter, and the goal is to move the sensor board along its slotted mounts in very small amounts while monitoring the current draw at a reasonable motor speed. Move the sensor board to the point where the current draw is the lowest, for that speed.

In other words, Hall sensors actually suck. Incredibly so – which is why I am so glad the Jasontrollers get the hell out of sensored mode as soon as they can! The timing you establish using that procedure is only the minimum for that speed. For instance, if you time the sensors while the motor is spinning very slowly, then the timing will be too retarded for high speed operation, resulting in high current draw. If you time the sensors at wide open throttle, the timing will be too advanced for low speed running and the motor could have trouble starting since the phases will “fire” too early.

Maybe I’m opening a huge can of magnet wire shaped worms by introducing these things, but hey.

test video

Check out this sweet video of Chibikart totally not needing a punt to start from standstill, even on carpet, while turning! Still no reverse, though.

These sensor rigs will be available on e0designs.com as soon as I hammer out the shopping cart and payment details. If you’re really aching, feel free to email me, though!

 

Along with most of the rest of MITERS, I’ll be party vanning down to the New York Maker Faire on…. well, now. It’s this weekend.

Like last year, I’m hauling an immense pile of MITERS cargo in addition to a few hapless freshmen and sophmores (who I think count as cargo anyway?). Last time, I brought Landbearshark. This time, I’ll be bringing something about equal in mass but a little more fun: Double Chibis! Tagging along also because they fill space efficiently will be RazEr REV2 and Kitmotter Display Stand.

There go any chance of flying down the hillsides at the NY Hall of Science though.

The Chibikarts, unlike most of everything I build, have been working rather reliably. Chibikart 1 suffered 2 broken motors when MITERS used it for Orientation activities – I’m not really sure went on, but the front two motors were just totally unresponsibe – but the controllers were fine. However, Chibikart 1 still worked with the 2 rear motors, so that’s been its demo state for most of this month.

Last week I decided to crack them open in anticipation of repairs for the NYMF.

Well damn. It looks like my somewhat hastily-soldered phase star-point connections exploded. The solder joints became little balls of solder – indicative of a serious current overload or something. Either way, the damage to both of the motors was similar, so I just re-terminated them. I coated the windings in a thick layer of polyurethane varnish that the high-voltage crew at MITERS like to seal their Tesla Coil secondaries with.

A few days ago, Chibikart1 was involved in a…. “filming accident”.

While I was in the middle of the Poorly Coordinated Death Spiral, the right front motor lost power and started smelling real funny. Upon opening the motor again, I discovered that the windings were actually not burnt – but just shorted. As I unwound the stator,huge chunks of the magnet wire insulation were flaking off and coming apart. I was literally pulling lengths of bare wire from the stator.

My suspicion is that the urethane varnish damaged the insulation of the wire either by being too tenacious (typical cheap magnet wire with sub-300 celsius insulation rating are coated with polyurethane-based enamels) which caused the insulation to prefer the urethane coat instead of the wire, or the solvent was too strong and dissolved or damaged the insulation chemically.

Bottom line is, don’t seal your motor with urethane if it has wires made of urethane. On a similar note, titanium screws in titanium threads will degenerate into the slightly less useful case of a solid blob of titanium.

What was worse, actually, was that the urethane sealed the whole stator into a solid mass of wires. I could not hope to ever unwind this without baking or chemically destroying the urethane in some way. The magnet wire strands just broke off as I tried to pull on them.

I had to rewind both of the front motors, which didn’t take that long since I was used to it:

To give the wires one more layer of protection, this time I insulated the crossing strands with some Kapton layers.

Completed rewind. I decided to group the star point connections into one termination this time instead of attempting to solder a ring of wire around the outside of the windings. The whole mess was coated in epoxy (like I should have done to start with…), and Chibikart 1 is now kicking again.

Chibikart2/DPRC has received no mechanical mods or upgrades, but I did jump the shunt on the 350W Jasontrollers a bit to give it some more punch. Because of the ~25A constant current limit of the Jasontrollers, DPRC is actually a little anemic despite having higher potential power. To really use those motors, I’d need some sensor boards (hmm, I wonder where I could get some) and use higher-current Kelly controllers.

Come see Chibikart and DPRC (and RazEr & co.) at the MITERS display area in the Hackerspaces area (Zone B) at NYMF!

Oh yes, a preview of things to come:

 

Over the weekend, I took Chibikart (and a few tagalongs) to the Ol’ Silley Vehicule Proving Grounds and took a few metered runs up:

It was actually slower than Chibikart1 by a fair margin, hitting only a 72 second best time, compared to Chibikart 1′s best of 62 seconds. On the whole, though, it was more efficient, consuming only 11Wh of battery during that run. The best product score was 784.8 Wh*s.

Neither result – that it’s slower but more efficient overall – is surprising. First, we already know that hub motors are less efficient than indirect drive systems – they have to pull more current, generally, to perform the same amount of work and being would for high torque also necessarily increases the motor resistance (for the same form factor).

But DPRC is slower because the Turnigy 5065 motors have a much lower torque produced per amp even after accounting for the 2.5:1 geardown between them and the wheels. From my adventure building the new motors, I know their torque constant Kt to be roughly 0.12 Nm/A. For the Turnigy motor, at 236 RPM/V, that translates to a Kt of 0.04 [1] – multiply by the 2.5:1 torque increase of the chain drive that that comes right out to 0.1 Nm/A.

This different alone isn’t enough – Chibikart 1 has four motors, for a grand total (lumped parameter) of 0.48 Nm/A, whereas DPRC only has 2 motors for a total of 0.2 Nm/A. Given that the 350W Jasontroller is safely limited to 25A output in all cases, DPRC can only produce half of the acceleration of Chibikart 1. But most of the garage race is spent flooring it, or at near-constant velocity, so only significant speed changes will contribute to the time. Hence why the discrepancy isn’t, say, 50% slower or something.

I have a feeling that Chibikart 1 on 2 motors will get a much worse result than DPRC – it’s only a ~16% time gain (7/6ths) for half of the available torque!

 

Kind of like Kim Jong-Il, nobody really knows when the Democratic People’s Republic of Chibikart was born, or where. I think it was some time on  Wednesday, actually, but I haven’t put up an update on it here because I’ve been plowing through the Instructable that I promised pretty much every day since then. This thing is a book. It’s 46 Instructables steps long, but each one has on average 5 or 6 “substeps” because otherwise I was facing the prospect of a 200+ step Instructable. But more on that later.

First, a recap of… what essentially is Wed. night, I suppose. (The prior update which include some of the frame construction is here)

First off is the electronics deck. Compared to Chibikart, wiring this thing was a breeze. I gave the Jasontrollers a well-deserved haircut since I was not using any of their auxiliary functions, and that instantly made the wiring like 10 times cleaner.

DPRC features a real terminal block which serves all the power distribution and signal connections, so the plan itself was more open to begin with.

I do like this arrangement of parts – it’s fairly clean, and the plate is entirely under the seat so you don’t really see any of it from a standing position. The plate can be pushed forward if I ever want to switch to the bigger 500W class Jasontroller, but in my mind this is not really worthwhile.

If those Jasontrollers look a little familiar, almost like I used them for something else before, that’s because…

Poor Chibikart.

Well, my next batch of Jasontrollers didn’t come on Wednesday, and last time I pledged that

If they don’t come by Wednesday, I might actually knock two Jasontrollers off Chibikart for now just to get it over with. Because I want to ride it. Badly.

-me, a few days ago

Chibikart still runs fine on 2 motors, though! In fact, for a while, it totally did. The acceleration is a little less glamorous.

Here’s the electronics deck installed in DPRC with wire extend-o-splices already made. The e-deck drops onto the frame from the bottom – the whole frame is turned over, the e-deck bolted on, and then it’s turned back over to finish wiring the switch and other parts. The seat is off this whole time. It was alot more elegant than trying to jiggle all the components while the seat was already covering them, like I had to do for Chibikart1.

And here is the completed Pretty Shot!

This build is way cleaner, and also much lighter. We weighed Chibikart versus DPRC, and Chibikart actually weighs almost exactly 50 pounds. This was over my estimates, but Chibikart also has an unnecessarily huge battery and much heavier motors.

DPRC weighed in at only 36 pounds, with everything on it. I swear Melonscooter is about that heavy…

Compared to Chibikart 1. They’re the exact same outer dimensions and exact same height otherwise. Seeing Chibikart1 weigh so much really makes me want to downgrade the A123 module to some A123 12V7 bricks or the equivalent K2 bricks. I do have a few more A123 bricks left over, so perhaps it’s time for an Alphanumeric Battery Company (ABC) shootout with Chibikarts!

Instructable

As promised in the original mission statement, I’ve finished the Instructable document. In it, you will find the above build progress pics and MANY MANY MANY more. The “Instructable pictures” folder in my DPRC build pics folder has 298 items in it. I don’t even have a word count, but I am positive it is well over 9000. I’ve entered it into the “Make It Real” contest, because the line of 3d printers in the IDC shop needs expanding – either the Objet or the PP3dP Up would be a fun addition to the lineup in the minishop.

hoonage video

This is probably the part that people actually care about – the test video! We made use of the convenient closed loop found in the building architecture yet again. I used Chibikart1 to film a few people driving around the… uhhh…. course.

Additionally, the first spinup video is here – it was linked in the Instructable too.

Merry Chibiiing.

There’s lots of variations on the phrase “80/20″ – usually it’s some corruption or adaptation of the Pareto Principle, bent and shaped to your specific industry. Legend has it that 80/20 framing got its name from having 80% of the strength of a solid bar of aluminum of the same outer dimensions, but at 20% of the weight. I think it actually weighs a little more than that, but even according to 80/20 themselves the name is just derived from the classical “80% of the results come from 20% of the effort”.

Now, in terms of hours spent building this version of Chibikart, I don’t think I’ve even come close to that. I’ve probably spent around 4 or 5 hours staring intently at a waterjet head versus maybe the same amount actually putting parts together and fabricating. And if I factor in the many hours spent stewing over little details in the design, like how to shove brakes onto this thing, I’m even worse off, probably closer to 20/80…

But what I’m trying to say is, 80/20 is awesome and being able to pitch so many parts of DPRChibikart together in a single day sure as hell makes it feel like I’ve gotten 80% of the way there…. if only. I’ve been taking some notes and modifying the design to make the assembly steps easier. I’ve also been finding that some of the parts I specified in the design are not as appropriate as I had imagined, and while I would totally just modify or custom-machine a part to fit the bill better, having to find a workaround that is a repeatable process by others is challenging as well.

First, a brief recap showing more Pretty Instruction Pictures and some more completed subassemblies.

I put together the “uprights” for the front wheels, and I must say that I’m really proud of these. I had expected some fit issues with the head of the bolt and generally keeping everything together, but once I tightened down the 4-40 screws which lock the layers together, and tightened the wheel spindle bolt, the whole thing was rock solid. I have no doubt this will be able to carry any reasonable load DPRChibikart will experience.

My intent with the eventual Instructable isn’t so much presenting a step-by-step of how to build Chibikart as putting together a sneaky way to present resources and techniques while applying them directly to an example build. I’m convinced that said resources and techniques will be way more useful to people than building the whole kart will be – it is going to cost a ton of money and you can readily extend the concepts to your own weird vehicle anyway. Making the uprights for a kart is generally one of the harder things to do – right angle part mates are almost always more difficult to make rigid (short of welding, I suppose), and this will be one more page in the book of tricks.

The rear motor mount/corner modules also came out as expected. A small amount (<10min) of file-fitting was required, but I think the tolerances on these slots is more than reasonable given my experience with different waterjets.

When the wheel is clamped by the spindle bolt, the whole thing becomes rock solid and all the parts are constrained by screw pressure – nothing can come loose and slide off, for instance.

One of the fine tuning details I was playing with was raw-waterjet bearing fits. Normally you would precision bore the hole on a milling machine to get a proper bearing press fit, but if you know the qualities of the machine you use well, then you can make a bore which is natively the right size. However, this is a very risky procedure because then your parts are not gauranteed to be duplicable on anyone elses’ machines.

Hence why I will elect to keep these steering kingpin bearing bores oversize than risk having them be too tight of a press fit, even though they were just right for me. Because these are flanged bearings and the kingpin will keep them tightly bound together, there is almost no need for a tight press fit. It could even be sort of jiggly to start with, held in place later by loading.

Cool assembly methods will not be the only thing in the Instructable. I intend to put a healthy amount of manual fabrication tips in as well – the first of which is DON’T TRY TO SUPERMAN-GRIP YOUR PARTS AS YOU DRILL THEM.

I was reaming out the kingpin holes in the uprights with a 1/2″ drill bit when it suddenly bound and whipped the whole thing out of my grip. Not bad damage at all (and I jut kept working), but I stopped to think a second about what I’m having people do with tools, and how tools can eat you.

The remainder of the holes were done with the upright securely locked in a vise.

After finishing as many subassemblies as I could, I started cutting 80/20. Normally this would be a horizontal bandsaw (“drop saw”) operation, but did I have a horizontal bandsaw in high school? Not really.

So I hit these with the Sawzall. Very brutal and surprisingly clean and straight. The “S” indicated that the section was cut starting from a clean square end of 80/20, which I deemed critical for some alignments. “NS”, of course, then stands for “Not Square” – a piece which won’t be involved in any end-fastening.

Alright, with all of the freestanding subassemblies done, it was time to to assemble the frame! Here’s a shot of everything so far, along with the ‘critical hardware’ needed for the procedure. This will probably be a theme in the Instructable: necessary materials/parts, tools, and fasteners will be listed, with allowable deviations also listed. If there’s more than one way to make a part, then I’ll try to discuss that too.

Magic happens, and here’s the whole frame. 80/20, anyone?

If I didn’t stop every 15 seconds to take a picture, this would have been an under-1-hour job.

For kicks, I rushed ahead a little and put the wheels on. This is not a step, but I just wanted to see how it looks compared to Chibikart proper (would it be the Republic of Chibikart?). I was missing some critical nylon and bronze washers at this point, so I called it a night here.

If you’re paying attention, you can clearly tell by the ambient lighting what work was done during the day and what was at night.

Another day! No, my left arm is not sublimating as I work. This is an “action shot” from when I was filing out the internal bore of a 0.75″ bronze bushing, cleaning up the result with some sandpaper. I should not have found it surprising that raw aluminum tubing is not made to shaft-fit tolerances. I had specified a 0.75″ OD 6061 tube for the steering column, but really it was more like 0.76″ or so.

While I wouldn’t have had second thoughts boring out the bushing on a lathe (and in fact did for Chibikart, just forgot), I realized I wasn’t allowed to do that. So, elliptical filing action it was. This was how they USED to make bearings, dammit.

I will most likely make a note in this step that intsead of using aluminum/steel tubing, McMaster sells precision aluminum shafting in 0.75″diameter which would natively fit in such a bushing. It would weigh significantly more, but aluminum is light anyway.

After the steering parts are assembled…

The brake pedal came out nicely. I only had one concern, and it was that the vertical pieces are way too close together. I specified their distance based on a scooter brake-holding-cross-drilled-screw-thing that I already had, which was pretty short. I then lost it, so had to source new ones from Cambridge Bicycle. It turns out that bicycle caliper BHCDSTs are usually alot longer, and I wanted most of these brake parts to be sourceable from bike shops for repeatability. I may make an untested design change for the Instructable in which the pedal itself is made wider to accomodate different length screws. It would also cut down on the sheer number of washers I had to stack between the plates…

And the front end is off the ground! Putting together the steering involves cutting some allthread, which I did using a hacksaw. Man, it’s been a while since I hacksawed the shit out of something.

Mounting the sprocket on the motor was a chance for me to finally use a mostly bullshit tactic that I had been saying to people to get them to stop asking questions. Yes, that’s a chunk of a soda can hanging out of the sprocket there. I’d jokingly suggested to people before that soda cans in fact are sources of precision shims from 0.004″-0.006″ and that they can be used as crude metric-to-imperial bore converters if needed.

Well, I’m not joking any more. I measured the can wall of a Sprite Zero at 0.0045″ +/- fuck, this isn’t 2.671 near the 1/3 mark. 6mm is 0.236″, and 0.25″ is… uhhh, 0.250″. So there’s about 0.007-0.008″ per side to make up, or 2 full turns of soda can. Procedure: Cut small strip of soda can, wind into coil, stuff into sprocket.

Note that the thickness increases near the endcaps due to the drawing process, so if you need a thicker shim, you can cut closer to the ends. The can walls are thinnest in the middle, which according to my old 2.671 Soda Can lab paper is about 0.0041″.

To add to the list of things I’m really proud of on this build, these half-caliper half-railcar brakes came out pretty awesome. The circular notch holds the little cable-end-ball-thing of a road bike brake cable. A general cheap road bike brake pad is the friction element, and the cable-tension-adjusting-hollow-bolt-thingie is also sourced from a road bike caliper brake.

I spent an incredible amount of time just learning what these specialized bike brake parts were called. I’ve gathered that:

1. “cable-end-ball-thing” is  a nipple
2. “cable-tension-adjusting-hollow-bolt-thingie” is a barrel adjuster
3. “brake-cable-holding-cross-drilled-screw-thing” is an anchor bolt or pinch bolt.

So yeah. If you want to pre-buffer parts, go get two standard road bike brake cables with at least one nippled end, two smallish brake pads, two barrel adjusters, and two anchor bolts. Use the proper terminology so your bike shop guys don’t give you the “wtf?” face when you literally use those Buffy-speak names.

Clamping the cable this time is much, much easier compared to the fiddling I had to do with Chibikart’s brakes, which didn’t use brake-cable-holding-cro ANCHOR BOLTS. The waterjetted cable sleeve holders also worked out very well, requiring no drilling or messing with.

BAM! Rolling frame.

The brakes on this are obnoxiously good. Probably because I overcompensated since Chibikart proper had no brakes to speak of until 2 weeks ago. This will lock up and skid with 65A durometer Colsons, which means if I fit hard wheels on the back it will drift readily. This is exciting.

What’s left but to have your friends push eachother around while looking silly?

Here’s what’s left.

• Assemble the electronics plate. This involves waiting for a new shipment of Jasontrollers, which should arrive this week. If they don’t come by Wednesday, I might actually knock two Jasontrollers off Chibikart for now just to get it over with. Because I want to ride it. Badly.
• Put all the pictures into rough assembly order and make smaller sizes  of them, because there are currently 235 of them. Not all will be used, but most will be!
• Write the damn thing. I need to start now if I have any hope of finishing before the Make It Real Challenge is over!