T minus 1 month

 The ticking clock is really starting to get loud now. I can't believe it's been a month since my last post. Time is really flying by and I still have so much to do. The good thing is, it's actually taking shape. This project was originally something that I thought's I'd spend a couple of months on and then focus on the rocket portion. After a couple of years of trying to build it between school and work, I kind of started to think that I'll never actually finish this rover. It really makes me happy to see it almost finished. Here's some pictures I've taken over this past month:

I had my friend Paul at Paul's Speed & Machine, Inc machine these new aluminum shoulder joints out for me. I asked for 4 and he was nice enough to make 8 just in case I screw up on the holes for the springs. These things are EXACTLY what I drew up on inventor and fit perfectly! Having these work how I planned took a huge burden off of this project. Thanks so much for your help Paul!

 

These were the parts all laid out. The new shoulder halves, the 5.5 in-lb spring, the 3/8 inch aluminum tube, and the high-performance plastic bushings.

I fought with the springs for a couple of days last week, trying to bend the ends 90 degrees so they would fit in the holes that I had drilled in the shoulder parts. I managed to get this one to work great but then I had difficulty duplicating it on the joint. My biggest problem was getting the ends of the springs bent in the exact right place so that the 2 halves of the shoulder joint would be where I needed them. I decided, after much frustration, that maybe bending the springs was not the way to go and I should just drill some holes so that I don't have to bend the springs at all.

So I settled on drilling at an angle like this. Actually since the drill bit walked a lot, I had to start by drilling straight on with the side of the part and then slowly change the angle until I got what I needed.

Once I got the shoulder joints worked out, I set to work on the aluminum tube and a metal bracket to hang from the tube to then mount the plastic body onto. 

I soon decided that the metal bracket should be inside the body so I had to shorten it and re-drill the holes. I've settled on making the rover wider now so that I have more room inside for all the things that are going in there. This means that the current body I have made won't work and will need to be re-designed a little. 

 I should be getting the retaining clips soon so the suspension should be fully mounted to the tube this week. And after running the wires through the tube, I noticed that I should almost make this thing more modular by adding little wire harnesses to the motor wires up by the shoulders so that way I can just unplug the wires and pull a clip to be able to take the suspension off. And then the plastic body will be screwed onto the metal bracket so that will be removable also. 

 I started work on the metal detector part as well. I spent almost a week trying to build a very small metal detector circuit but nothing seemed to work right. So I bought one. This thing was perfect for what I needed. I opened it up yesterday and found a nice small circuit that should talk nicely to the Arduino Mega. Oddly enough, it doesn't notice our little Chelyabinsk meteorites we have so I think the metal detector arm will now need a magnet for testing these low iron types of meteorites. (Yes, the Chelyabinsks do stick to a magnet even though there's not much iron in them.)

 But anyway, Lots to do yet but it's coming together nicely. One more month to go and then we're off to SpaceFest and NASA JPL to show this off to some people, and then after that, it needs to be ready for presentation for my student project at school. Yikes! Wish me luck world!