The little motor that.. almost could.

 I had a little bit of time yesterday to quickly throw a motor, gear, and wheel on and test it out to see how it all works together.

 It went well except I'm afraid the motor might not have enough power. I think all 6 motors combined will give it enough power to move but probably not enough power for climbing over little rocks and up hills. Sooo... perhaps I'll look into stronger motors that won't exceed my 1.2 Amp limit. But this is all for now. 

+Cristin Finnigan and I are headed off to Space Fest in Tucson, bright and early tomorrow morning! We're really looking forward to meeting lots of like minded people, meeting astronauts, and hearing all about the awesome field of space exploration! This is going to be great!! Perhaps I'll post some pics when we get back. Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Change of plans... sorta..

Over the Mother's Day weekend/Fishing Opener, I had a second to take a rubber O-ring I got from the hardware store and try it out on the main drive pulleys and decided I didn't like it. Inconsistent and a little sloppy. So I really started to lean towards 6 small motors to drive this thing. I did a bunch of research the other day and found a bunch of motors with, at best, a 900 mAh draw all the way up to 4 Amps. That was never going to work. The Arduino motor controller has 4 motor connections with a 1.2 Amp limit on each. Since I have 6 motors, I'll need to double up motors on 2 of the motor connections which means, by my figuring, I'd need to find motors with at most 600 mAh.

 I happened to have a Zip Zap truck laying around so I stole the motor from that and tested it. It only had a 140 mAh draw! I remembered seeing similar motors in the micro helicopter section at the local hobby store so I made a run there after school yesterday. They were nice enough to let me test the only motor they had in stock and it came up around 140 mAhs too! So I bought the one and ordered 5 more. They should be in by the middle of next week. Here's a pic of the one I have:

So with something to measure now, I sat down and added to my CAD drawing. 

  I also found the limits to my computer after having more than one purple gear on the screen at a time so I changed the others to a smooth disc so I could still rotate the drawing. So now I need to draw in the brackets that hold the motors in place but you get the idea. Also, maybe some day I'll draw better wheels. 

  Here's a roughed out finished designed so folks can see what I have planned. The camera and rock sampling arm are by no means done. Just a quick addition to the drawing so you get an idea.

  So that's it so far. I'll get some time this weekend to actually work on it so we'll see how far I get without the other motors. 

  If only I had a laser cutter and a 3D printer! This would be so much closer to being done!

Update!

Ok, this week I plan to mount the gear box and find an appropriate belt to use on this whole belt drive system. Gotta run off to class here in a few minutes and then work after that sooo... perhaps this weekend.. sometime..

Anyways, here's some of my favorite distractions..

Kerbal Space Program

Farming Simulator ... I know. But it's relaxing!

Project Apollo for Orbiter Space Flight Simulator

Oh, and make sure you feed the fish while you're here. I tend to forget..

It all starts here.

Back in the day when I was a young teenager building rockets with my neighborhood friends, I had the crazy idea that one day I would build a small rover or lander of some kind and launch it out into the small Minnesota field where I grew up. The most likely of things a kid could do would be to build a lander that was solar powered and at least could broadcast sound back via a small walkie-talkie.
  Well.. as life goes, distractions happened and my little project had to wait. Finishing high school, then several years of college, several moves, jobs, girlfriends, bands, and bars all became first priority. Soon, something like 16 years had gone by before I found my inner child again at the age of 31.
  The dream never really went away though and for all those years I kept an ever changing design in my head until one day I found a cell phone battery and a small RC tank laying around and officially started The Rover Project on Sept. 30th 2011.
  This blog is a running documentary on this childhood dream of mine and it will follow every test, new idea, and inevitable failure along the way to me getting a semi-autonomous homemade rover built, packed into a rocket, sent out into a field, and withstanding the elements for an entire weekend of rock sampling.
  Currently I work and go to school both full time and have a fairly busy social life so I typically don't have much time to spend on this project nor the tools to achieve what I actually want. Now are the days where I truly regret leaving the model shop I used to work at. So now, I do what I can with a fairly limited budget and a borrowed Dremel.
  Explanations aside, lets get back into the lengthy start of this blog with the first video I shot of a tank tread and battery crawling across the counter.

  I dissected the tank and wired the battery to one of the treads to produce my first test in a series of more tests to come.

 After I found that I could successfully power one tread with the battery, I hot glued both of them to my little bread board and plugged in the battery to produce this short test exactly a month later:

  This month long space between small tests would actually set the pace for this entire project. Now, I should say, at the time I started this project, I didn't have any real electronics knowledge (something I will remedy later in this blog). But just basic electricity and a love for electronic toys, especially anything Radio Controlled.
  After getting the project mobile, I needed a way to control it so I went to the only means of control I knew anything about and that was RC.
  Unfortunately I don't have any videos or pictures of this next phase because honestly I thought it was kind of silly and far from anything I could possibly launch in a rocket. Not to mention I never thought anyone would ever be interested in my childhood dream so writing about it and keeping a journal of the progress was pretty far from my mind. So I'll just have to describe this point the best I can.

  Sadly, my giant collection of Legos was boxed away in my mom's house which was 2 states away so I went to the Lego store to pick up some "prototyping" supplies. I ended up building a platform that would carry my project for the next year and a half until just a few weeks ago.

    This is actually a pic I took about a month ago because I realized I never took any pictures of my first test platform. (You can actually see a hint of things to come sitting next to it.) So originally inside that big hole in the middle, I had two servos from one of my RC trucks. I rigged up a small circuit with an on/off/charge switch and two button switches that the servos could press, wired the motors to the cell phone battery via the button switches and on/off/charge switch, and then had the servos and (at the time) the stationary camera on their own battery packs. With all that in place, I could drive this silly Lego contraption around and when the cell phone battery died, I'd plug it into a solar panel, flip the switch to charge, and let it sit in the sun for a while. 

 This accomplished several learning phases for me as a new rover designer/operator.

1: I learned how long a 900mAh battery would last me. (about 5 minutes or so)

2: I learned A LOT about charging batteries, via the internet, and found that my little solar panel needed to                put out more than the 3.5 volts that the battery had and at a rate fast enough to fill the 900mAh capacity while the sun was still out. So I selected the 6V 100mAh setting on my solar panel and let it sit for 9 hours. Slow, but it worked.

3: I also learned the capabilities of the wireless camera. This little guy went out to 300 feet with a 9V battery no problem. It broadcasts pretty decent video along with sound and claims to have the capability to go 450 feet and last up to 8 hours on a 9V. This was enough for what I wanted. I was so far just happy to sit in the living room and drive this little thing down the driveway and down the sidewalk a little bit. 

4: I soon found out I would need a new solar panel however, since this one was not powerful enough to power the camera on it's own like I had hoped.

I set out to find a new solar panel and settled with this one. It had more than enough power to charge a battery and run the camera. However it was attached to a heavy 1/8 inch piece of glass which would certainly not do for the weight limits of standard hobby rocket motors. Naturally that glass needed to go. Unfortunately it was held on with what turned out to be a layer of clear epoxy over the whole thing and the only way to get it off was with a heat gun I had at work. 

  After a lot of heat and slow peeling, I got about this far and cracked one of the cells. This has proved to be a bit more difficult than I hoped and so, currently, I am in the market for new lighter solar panel. This feature has been put on the back burner for now while I focus my limited time on more important things on this project. Like, how to get away from the RC components and get it more autonomous and computer controlled. 

  So this is the part where I stumbled across Arduino and my whole roving world changed. And much of my own world changed as well. I started watching Youtube videos of what people have done with their Arduino projects and couldn't wait to get my hands on one! At the age of 31, I was like little Ralphie Parker, in A Christmas Story, who, all he wanted was that darn Red Rider BB Gun. Telling my very supportive girlfriend +Cristin Finnigan all about Arduino and the things I could do with it! Showing her videos and websites at all hours of the day! I found all the stuff I needed to get started on Amazon for a mere $100! (I see the prices have dropped considerably in the past year) I found The Arduino UNO R3, the motor controller, 4 motors (which I didn't use), and a book to get me started! It was all there and ready for glory!!

  But sadly, at the time, we had just moved to Minnesota from the Chicago area and hadn't found the best of jobs yet so it would have to wait. So for the next 3 months I researched and planned, until one day in August of 2012, I had managed to free up the money and placed the order.

  

 During my research, I had re-ignited my original college ideas of going to school for robotics. I also realized why I never went for robotics in the first place. Schools that teach the cool kind of robotics you see on TV, don't seem to exist in Minnesota. Or at least nothing I could find or have access to. So I settled on a 2 year degree in electronics and would teach myself C++ in my spare time. 

  So with Cristin's blessing and the statement of "Go forth and be brilliant", I quit my assembly job at Ziess and signed up for day classes at Hennepin Tech. This also meant that I would need to find a second shift job somewhere. Fortunately, with my Bachelor's in Industrial Technology, I found a job right away working for GE Power and Water making industrial water filters on second shift. Cristin also got a better paying job in the wind energy field. Things were now in place for future greatness! (Still not sure what that might be yet, but things are in place for it.)

  The Arduino parts soon arrived and I quickly dove into the programming book. I also found Sciguy14's youtube videos, (which I highly recommend) infact, here's one now:

Arduino Tutorial

  

  After making the LED blink a few times, I decided this was not going to get my rover moving anytime soon, so I plugged in the motor controller, wired in my tank treads, and went to work on coding. I Googled something like, "arduino code for operating motors with a motor controller" and sifted through the results to find very useful code which I copied and pasted into the Arduino software. I ran a test and it actually worked! Then I started tweaking the code to find things that worked better. (if you'd like to see the code, ask for it. I'm just not sure how to post it without taking up too much space on my blog.)

  

  I did a lot of reading and found out you can control the Arduino with what is called the Serial Monitor under Tools on the Arduino software. So with some more code searching, I managed to give this thing some control using the WASD and spacebar keys. Unfortunately, I need to type the letter and hit enter to send the command. Which now days, I've grown to kind of like because it feels more like I'm sending it a command much like NASA would do but without the delay.

Yes, i'm dragging a 9V battery behind it. It was a test after all. I just wanted to see how the code worked and how hard it would be to control it. As you can see, I also added a servo to the camera (which wasn't plugged in) so I can look around. This bit of code actually was a little tricky because I needed to slow the servo down so that it didn't just rapid over to the angle I'd send it. I ended up having it turn a degree with every ',' and '.' I'd send it, with a small delay between reading commands. So I could send it something like, ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, and enter, to make it turn a bunch of degrees left and a bunch of periods and enter for right.  

  Later I ordered a wireless card for the Arduino.

And found out I had to program the two little wireless antenna cards as well. Fortunately this was just a one time bit of code that needed to be sent to these chips. It did take me a bit of internet digging and some trial and error but I got them working using a recommended program called X-CTU. 

  With everything working now, I needed some kind of recharge able battery and the one cell phone battery just wasn't doing it anymore. So I found some more and wired them in series to produce around 11 volts.

 I knew the Arduino and Camera had built in voltage regulators so a couple volts extra really wasn't going to hurt. And my aforementioned solar panel was able to charge this pack in about 3 hours. (I actually ended up destroying the solar panel about a month ago so it was still operational at this point.) Unfortunately, once again I failed to document how everything, including the camera all ran with this little battery pack, taped to the back, not dragging anymore. It all worked great until I started setting up for building the actual rover I wanted to fly. Since my actual design for this project had wheels instead of tank treads, I needed a gear system to drive the whole thing. So I ordered this gearbox. 

  I got the gearbox and put it all together. Then I wired the battery pack to both motors and it went WAAAHHhhhhhh.... About 5 seconds and my pack was toast. At this point I have about a semester and a half of electronics school under my belt so I grab my volt meter and found the middle battery had 0 volts and the other 2 were still at 3volts. Bad battery I thought, so I dug up another one I had laying around. Tested it at 3.5 volts, soldered it back in with the other 2 and tried again. WAAahhhh... Dead again. 0 volts on the middle battery. So I decide to grab a standard 9v and test the Amps on this thing. 900mAh just for the gearbox alone! The treads, Arduino, and camera were only pulling about 600mAh all together. So at this point I realized my lightweight idea of cell phone batteries was not going to work. I needed something stronger! 

  I ran out to Radio Shack and picked up a 1600mAh 9.6v rechargeable battery pack. No fooling around now! It so far is the heaviest part of the whole rover. Which might be ok since I probably do need a little weight just to get some traction while climbing over things. So after a successful test of the gearbox, Arduino set up, and camera all plugged into the battery pack, I deemed it.. good enough. The whole system pulled 1200mAh while running the motors and about 500mAh just sitting there waiting for a command. 

  I plugged the battery into my tank treaded rig and used it to continue to test code and just have some fun while I worked on the design for a more rocket worthy rover. 

Here's a little video of me testing the whole thing out. 

 

At this point I set it aside to focus on re-learning AutoCAD so that I can figure out what should work for a design before I start building anything. This is what I've come up with so far:

  

  The idea is to have the solar panel on top, 6 wheels driven by the gearbox and a TON of pulleys (22 in all), a servo out front to lift and lower an arm with an electromagnet for rock sampling (not drawn yet), and a servo on the back with the camera on a pole pointing forward over the solar panel (also not drawn yet). 

  So now we are up to what I have accomplished so far. 

  Nothing's really held in place at this moment. This picture is just a test fitting of all the components inside the box. I do have some of the shafts cut to the right length and some more pulleys on. The other night, I put a rubber band on the gearbox pulley and 2 others inside the box and turned it on. Basically it worked like I thought it would. The rubber band stretched and released with every slow revolution of the gearbox, causing the two smaller pulleys to rotate in a fast jerking motion. So at this point i'm waiting for a time to run to the hardware store to see about gasket making kits so I can basically make my own non-stretching belts. And if that doesn't work, I've been eyeing up 6 of those small motors they use in the quad rotor helicopters. 

 So this is where I'm at as of today 5/7/13. I have about 2 weeks left of this school year so I'm assuming I'll get a lot farther once I'm free for the summer. I had hoped I'd have it at least driving around by the end of April but now I'm hoping by the end of this month. I really want to do drop tests, overnight tests, and maybe rocket tests this summer. So we'll see how it all goes and I will do my best to keep this blog updated as I go. 

  Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy my second round of childhood. Feel free to comment (as long as it's constructive) and add me to your google+ circle if you want. We all could use more like minded friends.