A successful drive-motor test!

Nothing too fancy here. Just a couple of my new motors hot glued on with some wheels attached. But I was able to prove that just 2 of these little motors with their gear reduction systems are powerful enough to move the rover.

 So naturally after this test, I ordered 4 more motors from Amazon. And also added a temperature/humidity sensor and a distance sensor for when I finally get this thing moving and outside.
 Also since I had it moving back and forth on the floor, I thought I'd test out my speed settings. In this quick video, you can see me switching from low speed to high speed and back to low. (Sorry I wasn't really watching where I was aiming the camera on this one. Big pet peeve of mine! But you get the idea.)

 I can range the motor inputs from 0 to 210. Low is currently set at 50 and high is set at 200. I'm thinking low needs to be even slower so maybe I'll drop the number down to 20. But that can wait until I get all 6 motors properly attached.

 I'm also leaning towards this Autopilot so the rover can follow GPS way points instead of relying solely on commands from my laptop. It's a bit 'spendy' but this is kind of the ultimate goal with this project so it is a little bit necessary. Otherwise I can go with this GPS tracker to simply send coordinates back and I can plot them on Google Earth for some project "cool factor" points. This option is much cheaper but really has no functionality since the wireless range on the Arduino's XBEE system is about 300ft, which means I'll be able to physically see where it's at.

 Expensive parts are starting to lead me to maybe look into crowd funding for this project. I think total cost of parts, both used and not used, and tools that I needed for this project, is around $500. And I still need the $100 camera system, solar panels, suspension parts, some kind of parachute system, and an entire guided rocket to build. Sooo... next on my to do list is to look into crowd funding websites. Soo.. Stay tuned!