Found a name!

 Over the Thanksgiving break, +Cristin Finnigan and I had some time in the car to figure out a name for the rover. We came up with, Inspiration. It seems a fitting name since it is inspired by Sojourner and also, hopefully it will be an inspiration to anybody who wants to make something but has no idea how to do it. Because that's what this entire project is about. Going into this project, the only thing I knew about was gluing the acrylic box together. I started taking classes in electronics, did a whole bunch of internet research, met some people, and now this project is really starting to take shape. I still have more electronics to learn and just about everything yet to learn about rocketry and robotics. Hopefully this project will inspire lots of people to just get out there and do whatever they've been wanting to do, no matter how little they know about it. The internet is free and full of generations of knowledge! Dive in there and find your project!

  On another note. Cristin was REALLY awesome and spent a whole bunch of time coming up with this data sheet that contains a lot of bullet points on the project. Click on the pic to view a larger PDF.

It will be added to as the project progresses. Maybe the back side will have an entire "mission  layout" showing what the launching, landing, and driving sequence will look like. Lots more to come. Probably some videos soon too!

Strong work!

 Yesterday I managed to spend about 12 hours on the rover and made a huge stride in this project! First order of business was permanently attaching the wheels to the motors.

 After weeks of searching local hobby stores for 5/32 tube styrene, I broke down and ordered some from Amazon. I cut these into bushings of sorts, since the inside diameter of the wheels are much bigger than the motor shafts, and I press fit and glued them onto the shafts. Then I glued on the wheels. And yes, I am using the book, Sojourner by Andrew Mishkin, as a quick stand to put the tires on. From what I've read of this book so far, it is definitely inspirational for me and I can't wait to read more! I was recommended this book by friend and author, Jay Gallentine who wrote Ambassadors from Earth. Another book I highly recommend for space history nerds like myself. I also want to extend a huge thanks to Jay for giving me a good push and some fantastic ideas for the future of this project. Hopefully I'll be able to share more on this in the coming months. 

 Next we have wiring. I needed to add some on/off switches, a voltage regulator, and a diode to the total power output. 

 I added a power rail too for better organization. The toggle switches are for the battery and the solar panels. The solar panels are for charging the battery and possibly powering the whole thing but I won't find that out now until the sun comes back up in the summer. I decided it would be nice to isolate the 2 power sources for testing purposes. The voltage regulator was also a tricky one to track down. You'd think a 9v 7809 regulator would be easy to find at radio shack or even in my electronics lab. But no, I had to order that as well. Amazon has been my rover's best friend. The voltage regulator takes the 11.5 volts coming from the solar/battery circuit and holds it at 9 volts to safely power the Arduino and servos. I will still add a small battery sampling circuit so the rover can relay battery life back to me though. That will be coming kind of soon. 

 Once I got everything soldered together, it was time for a quick drive.... outside! My rover's first drive outside!

 Very exciting to see it driving along on pavement instead of carpet. However, it was short lived. When I decided to turn, my temporarily attached motors popped off the temporary place holders. No problem though. Just had to glue them back on and finish cleaning up the wiring. I did manage a quick drive in the kitchen again to test it out more.

Unfortunately I can't seem to upload the video so here's a quick video in the living room.

 Next I focused on a mock up of the camera mount. Here I took 7/16 styrene tubing, cut it at a 45 and attached it to the servo.

 Then added a rotational platform.

 Then I did basically the same thing for the other half, added a rubber band to hold it together and to provide some spring to the rotation, and got these pics:

And this little animation that I whipped up on Inventor..

 I plan to replace the mock-up with a better 3D printed version later. Which reminds me.. I'll have my very own 3D printer from Zeepro coming in April some time thanks to their Kickstarter campaign. Very excited for that one!

 But that's all for now. Next I'll mount the camera and get some video from it! 

Slight delay

 Ok, school and work have been slowing me down a lot lately but I've managed to assemble more things. I got the camera system in the mail last week and briefly tried it out. Here's the links for the camera and transmitter. Hopefully I'll get to test the half mile range sometime this week. But it looks good so far and hopefully I'll have some video for ya.
 I found and joined a website called GrabCad that has saved me a bunch of time of drawing the Arduino boards. So all I had to do was quickly draw the servos and camera for this latest drawing:

 I'm still working on the camera arm as well as the front arm. I'm leaning towards a metal detector system instead of an electromagnet for the rock sampling part of the front arm. I really have no intentions of collecting the rocks so I guess I really don't need to try and pick them up. Just sending a signal back saying how metallic the rock is, would be just fine. And actually now that I think of it, that would be a bit more informative than simply trying to pick up the rock.

 Let's see, what else have I done so far.... Oh a video!

 Since the suspension is taking a lot longer than I thought, I just glued the motors and wheels on so I could at least test code and stuff while I'm waiting for a laser cutter and/or a 3D printer like this one that I'm currently a backer for. If all goes well, I'll have my very own desktop 3D printer by April. *Fingers crossed*

So that's about all I've got so far. I'm still working on the solar panels and monitoring the voltage. Hopefully I can do that soon since the sun is now starting to go away for the winter. I'm off school for 3 days this week so hopefully I'll make some serious progress during this time. Stay tuned!

A brief update:

 So I haven't been able to do much these past couple of weeks. My work schedule changed and I'm back in school now too until June so progress has slowed a lot. I did manage to put a donation button up just in case any of you highly interested folk would like to see more action, you can feel free to donate and possibly even relieve me of the burden of working. (fingers crossed)
 All I've been able to do so far is draw on Inventor some more.

 Kind of trying to figure out what would work best for the suspension parts and eventual springs or torsion bars. This is all I have so far. I'm thinking .080 thick polystyrene to make the suspension arms out of. That way they can be strong yet hallow so I can run the motor wires through. I'm also thinking of using the bearings I got for my, now shelved, drive system and put those in all the hinge points for better stability.
 The Hack Factory should be getting a new laser cutter this month so hopefully I can pop in there and use it to cut this polystyrene. Otherwise I'll need to spend a lot of time with a dremel or jig saw cutting out all the pieces.
 It's so hard knowing that all I need are these last parts made to start test driving but I don't have the time to do it. Very frustrating. It'll happen though. The good side of this is that the more I wait, the better my ideas get.

By golly, I think this just might work!

Over the weekend I received the Virtuabotix temperature/humidity sensor and plugged it into the Arduino like the included diagram shows, downloaded the library from the Virtuabotix website, and right away I started getting temperature, humidity, and dew point readings. This little gadget will come in handy for monitoring the inside of the rover so I know the electronics are safe. I imagine in sunlight, the inside of the rover will be like the inside of a car so knowing how hot it gets in there, I can decide whether I need to use a bit of Mylar to keep the sun out or if it's not really needed. And also, knowing the temperature inside at night will be good so I can protect against dew build  up on the circuits.

 Since I was now getting information back from my rover, I decided it would be nice to know how many volts I have left on the battery. So I googled the code for such things and actually found the code on Arduino's website. 4 lines of code and a wire running to analog I/O port number 0. Since I'm dealing with a 10 volt battery and the I/O port can only handle 5 volts, I made a simple voltage divider circuit so the port only sees half the voltage and then I tweaked the code a little so it reports back 10 volts instead of 5. Unfortunately I did not take a picture of this set up before I took it apart to work on other things. But I'm sure you'll see it in action soon enough.

 I went out and got the solar panels I needed from Radio Shack and tested those on Sunday. Here I have a picture of a quick set up to take the 11.5 volts generated from the solar panels down to under 5 so I can monitor that voltage as well.

 I also received the ultrasonic range finder in the mail the other day too. I really haven't played with this yet but it should come in handy later for obstacle avoidance when I finally get this project rolling.

 Which brings me to my favorite part. I got the last 4 motors in the mail yesterday. I soldered on some wires, quickly hot glued them in place with some wheels attached, added lines of code for the new motors, and got a few tests done this morning.

 Yes I'm using a sugar dispenser for a test stand. It was the only thing tall and skinny enough around for such a quick test. But anyway, in the video you can see the Amps measured from the battery. I switch between high and low speeds to see the changes in Amp rating. 220 mAhs for all 6 motors on high! This means I can drive around for, ideally, 7 hours on a charge. Once I get the camera and servos in place, that number will likely drop quite a bit though. 

Now of course I had to set it on the floor just to see what would happen. 

 It kind of reminds me of when I was a little kid trying out ice skates for the first time. Obviously I'm not going to simply hot glue motors on and expect them to stay put. So now the next phase in this project is the suspension. I'm thinking hollow tubes for suspension arms, to hide the wires in, and some kind of torsion spring to allow for movement. More on this later. Stay tuned!

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!  

A maker's dilemma

 For the past couple of weeks I've been working on a prototype for the drive gear system. With the laser at The Hack Factory not cooperating (I'm told a really nice one will be in the shop some time in Sept.), I had to resort to some old school model making. I printed the outline of what I needed on a piece of paper and stuck it to a sheet of acrylic and cut out my pieces with a band saw. Then had to do some sanding but eventually I got this:

 All the pieces I need to put this gearbox together! So I started putting it together and filed the holes big enough for the bearings and motor and lined everything up. I was reluctant to actually glue everything together so I used some double sided tape and hot glue to produce this:

Then I added the motor and slapped on some wheels just to see if the gear system was strong enough for one to pull the whole thing along.

I started out with a simple test to see if it would even work. So I put it on a piece of tupperware and sent it the drive signal.

  And it actually worked! A bit louder than I thought it would be too. After this video it started to skip some teeth and sounded like the battery was going to die. I think the motor got warm enough to soften the hot glue I had holding it in place and caused it to move away from the gear that it was so perfectly meshing with. I also decided that the skipping wasn't horrible so it was time for a floor test. No video of this however since it didn't actually go anywhere. I didn't think it was necessary to glue the main gear onto the axle for the test so of course it slipped and there for did not turn the wheel. Oops..

 So with the battery sounding like it was going to die, I did some electrical testing. The battery was holding strong at 10 volts so I switched to measuring the amps and was a little shocked to see that the motor and gear system, along with the arduino boards, was drawing 750 mAhs. Sooo.. I figure with all six in place, my little 1600 mAh battery would last about 15 minutes at best. Judging by the sound of the motor, it would be far less. 

 I ended up ordering a couple of motors with their own gear reduction system on them. $15 a piece so not too bad. But they were 6 volt motors so I wasn't sure how they'd work.

 So my dilemma is that they do work! Very well actually! They're super quiet and total draw from this and the arduino boards is only about 150mAh! That's about 10mah from the motor! I could drive all day with all 6 of these hooked up. So I guess my dilemma is kind of a no brainer but I still feel like I put so much time and effort into that gear reduction system, it would be a shame not to use it. I guess we'll see how much power these little guys have once I figure out a way to mount them and attach the wheels. Perhaps tomorrow I'll rig up a quick attachment and see if the 2 motors I have will be powerful enough to move everything.

  Also, on the C++ side of things, I figured out pretty easily how to send information back from the Arduino so that I know I'm getting a good signal and also what command I sent it. I also tried some code so that I can control the speed of the motors as well. So by pressing numbers 1 thru 4, I can give it 4 different speed settings (or as many as I want I suppose).

 Hopefully by this weekend I'll get this thing moving and more motors ordered. I'm 4 months behind but finally I might have some real movement!