Finished suspension drawing

 I have the whole week off from work and school! Know what that means? Yup, plenty of time to work on Inspiration! So I've spent the past couple of days drawing all the suspension parts and making them work together so that I can hopefully print them soon. 

 After a lot of thought and drawing, I decided to go with a design modeled after Don Bickler's rocker-bogie system that was used on Sojourner. This way, I use less bearings, only need 1 hole per side for wires to  run through, and if attached in the correct spots, the body of the rover will self level by hanging from the "shoulder" joints. Here's a picture of what I drew on Inventor:  

 All the suspension parts are interchangeable with the other side's parts so I can simply print 2 of every part and I won't need to worry about which side of the rover it goes on. The grey shafts are going to be 7/16 styrene tubing that can be cut to whatever length I need them, for better customization if I feel I need it and also to run the motor wires inside of for better "housekeeping". The "shoulder" joints are designed to fit a coil spring inside so during launch, the body can be as low as possible and after landing, it will be able to spring to its designed ride height. 

 The sampling arm is my next step in this drawing. It's still roughed out so I can see if it might hit the wheels and also to give everyone an idea of what's going on the front. Hopefully I'll get this drawn up real nice this week.

 Then there's this really quick video to show how the camera arm is going to work. It's way too fast but it's kind of a proof of concept model anyways. 

 I plan to slow this down a whole lot by using one of my extra wheel motors or simply using another coil spring to rotate the arm up. I like the motor idea but it's extra weight that I don't need and I think I'm running out of control outputs on the arduino as well. I'll definitely spend some time on this part soon though.

A Video!

I seem to be having difficulty with Blogger uploading my videos. So I figured out the YouTube way of embedding videos.
Now you get to see more videos like this 'rover's view' video.

 My 8 year old nephew, Will, inspired this video. Just before Thanksgiving, I was showing him how far along the rover is, then he dumped out some Jenga blocks and told me to drive over them. I had never stress tested the motors and wheels before so I totally agreed and found out this thing really has some power! I continued to drive over the blocks for about 10 minutes without any sign of the battery losing power. This quick video I uploaded was a little recreation of that test. Hopefully soon, I'll have suspension on and it'll work even better. Also, you can see the camera displayed on my laptop's screen. In the next few months, I plan on incorporating this into a nice graphical user interface.

Found a name!

 Over the Thanksgiving break, +Cristin Finnigan and I had some time in the car to figure out a name for the rover. We came up with, Inspiration. It seems a fitting name since it is inspired by Sojourner and also, hopefully it will be an inspiration to anybody who wants to make something but has no idea how to do it. Because that's what this entire project is about. Going into this project, the only thing I knew about was gluing the acrylic box together. I started taking classes in electronics, did a whole bunch of internet research, met some people, and now this project is really starting to take shape. I still have more electronics to learn and just about everything yet to learn about rocketry and robotics. Hopefully this project will inspire lots of people to just get out there and do whatever they've been wanting to do, no matter how little they know about it. The internet is free and full of generations of knowledge! Dive in there and find your project!

  On another note. Cristin was REALLY awesome and spent a whole bunch of time coming up with this data sheet that contains a lot of bullet points on the project. Click on the pic to view a larger PDF.

It will be added to as the project progresses. Maybe the back side will have an entire "mission  layout" showing what the launching, landing, and driving sequence will look like. Lots more to come. Probably some videos soon too!