Steering and router

 Alright I'm back. Slow progress. But that's been kind of the theme of this project since the start. Even though I'm finally done with school, it would appear that other things still fill my time. Currently there have been two other projects going on besides Inspiration. For one, we have been working on becoming homeowners! After looking at several houses, we've finally settled on one and now in the process of purchasing. If all goes well this month, Stray Robotics will be moving from this little work bench:

 To this much larger work space with outlets already positioned for the super long work bench that will run the length of the wall and maybe that far wall as well. 

 The second project that's been taking up my evenings is a Shapeoko 2 cnc router that several of us Anoka Tech students are making. We got the kits, motors, power supplies, and hardware and started assembly a few weeks ago. 

The frame as of last week

The stepper motors, motor driver, and power supply

Assembly as of 3/31/15

 When I'm not working on those two projects, I try to get things done on Inspiration. Lately my focus has been on the front steering brackets and getting the Pololu Mini Maestro servo controller to do what the Arduino tells it to do. In this video, I have 5 of  the 6 total drive servos plugged  in and running along with 1 high torque steering servo. This is testing to see if the Maestro can drive all of these servos at once without any problems.  

 The Maestro performed flawlessly but there seems to be a delay on the Arduino side that I've noticed periodically while driving Inspiration around. For some reason this delay shows up more with the Maestro. I'm willing to bet it has something to do with my pieced together code and the way it looks for an input command from me. 

 But anyway, after this test, I started on the upper servo bracket. I drew up something to hold the steering servo onto the front suspension arm.

 Once I had the bracket drawn up, it was time to send it to the printer. I didn't get video of this one printing but it turned out alright. 

Here's a video showing how this bracket works with the wheel.

Just a mock up of how it will replace the current front suspension.

Next up for me will be to print the right front brackets and then try to figure out how to do the rear suspension. My plan is to have this thing steering by this summer, so hopefully I can spend some more time on this once the router is finished. Stay tuned and have fun!