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.
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