I'M FREE!!!

 I am finally done with school! Thank you Anoka Tech, Tom Reid, Daniel Truchon, and Curt Barnier for all of the wonderful knowledge I have gained and can now go out and use! It has been a long journey that all started with this rover project two and a half years ago and has finally lead to a very useful A.A.S. Degree, a membership in Phi Theta Kappa, a membership with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and volunteer work with AirSpace Minnesota. And you may already know about presenting the rover at SpaceFest VI thanks to a little push from friend and space author Jay Gallentine. These are all things that I have gotten involved with directly because of following the dream of launching a rover into a field. And of course a lot of help from +Cristin Finnigan who showed me how to believe in myself and to go get my dreams. 

 So school is finally done but I feel like the real fun stuff is just about to begin. I can now devote more time to the rover and this nifty new 3D printer from Zeepro. 

 Now, if all goes well with this prototype printer, I can start printing better suspension parts for Inspiration and anything else I can think of that it might need as we progress.

 I know I want to create something to reinforce the inside of the rover and hold all of the electronics without being too heavy or in the way and also create parts to allow for steering and better ground clearance. So these will be the next parts that I will be working on.

 Over the past couple of months I did manage to spend some time working on Inspiration's battery charging system. You'd think the coding for 4 relays would be pretty straight forward and easy but it turned out to be kind of tricky to get around situations that would  cause 2 different if statements to be true and make the relays squeal from trying to be open and closed at the same time. It turns out I did actually over think the problem and just had to change some wiring and greatly simplify the code. Oh which reminds me, now that it's winter and the solar panels don't do much, I bought a Variable DC Power Supply to use for the 12volts or 300mA to charge the batteries during my tests. So far it works great and the Arduino shows them slowly charging and discharging while turning 6 continuous servos. So now I just have to simplify my charging circuit and stuff it into the rover.

 That's it for now. Hope everyone is having a great holiday season and I'll catch up with you next year!