Ok, so I haven't really done much with Inspiration in the past month and a half. I've kind of been taking a break on building and focusing more on rethinking ideas. I did manage to get some tests done before the sun went away for the next 5 months. (Well it doesn't totally go away. We have 8 hours of light but it's not very useful for what I need it for. Plus it's really darn cold out most of the time.) But anyway, I had noticed during our demonstration at SpaceFest that the inside of the rover got really warm when the sun came through a sky light and lit up the solar panel. So eventually I got around to testing the solar panel in direct sunlight and recorded a temperature of 115 degrees Fahrenheit on the under side. So I got to thinking, what is light weight and insulates well? I then looked down at the Styrofoam cup in my hand that was, very effectively, holding back the temperature of my morning coffee. Bingo! So after work I raced home and cut apart a Styrofoam container of some fantastic Thai food we had leftover from the night before. I cut some holes for the wires to fit through and stuck it to the underside of the solar panel.
I put the solar panel back on the rover and pointed it at the sun for a half an hour.
The results were a very comfortable 80 degrees Fahrenheit on all of the components inside.
About 3 weeks ago, I decided to get Inspiration outside and prove that the new suspension can do what I designed it to do. This was my last chance before winter so I apologize if the drive doesn't seem very well thought out. It was kind of a last minute idea to hurry up and record a video before the sun went down. But here it is, proof that Inspiration does, in fact, go outside and that the new suspension design actually works...except for a part I forgot to screw in place.
After we made the quick video demonstration, I started focusing on simplifying the code and making it more user friendly for the eventual graphical interface. Nothing fancy but a much needed command to stop before executing any other drive commands. The problem I had was that if you told it to turn and then mid turn, you told it to go forward, it would attempt to drive forward with the 4 corner wheels not pointed straight yet. So now the wheels stop at the beginning of each drive command and then it turns the wheels to the proper direction before proceeding with the drive. This should make it less prone to driver error and possible damage.
In the past couple of weeks I managed to join 2 different groups that will allow me to learn skills I will need for this rover project.
One is the Autonomous Snow Plow competition at the St. Paul Winter Carnival. I am on the planning committee and greatly look forward to seeing how people accomplish building a robot that can see and navigate a course on its own.
The second group I joined is a team of University of Minnesota students called LPRD who are designing and manufacturing a liquid fueled rocket. As of this evening, I have joined their launch sub-team and will be helping with fuel delivery systems for the engine. This is a very exciting project and they're always looking for help so if you're interested and can spend time working on rockets, click on the link I shared and sign up to help.
I hope to get moving on the rover project soon. SpaceFest VII is coming up in just over 6 months and I wanted to have some kind of lander put together by then. But first I need to finish the upgrades to the camera and metal detector. I think this is going to be a very busy 6 months.
Stay tuned!
