Week of 10/14

At the end of last week on Friday, I was finally able to preform the very first test of my rover. I was happy to see that it was able to move great. I drove it around the entire robotics shop with no difficulties and the transmitter and receiver are both working perfectly. However the issue begins with trying to get the rover over obstacles. The current flaw with the rover is its lack of traction, with only a small layer of double sided tape attached to the wheels. The problem with this design is that parts of the plastic wheel still maintain contact with the around making very hard to drive over different surfaces. After doing some research online I found a few different models of pre-made motors which I will order instead. This one change--I predict-- will have one of the biggest differences in the quality of the design and will help massively.

The second major issue is the lack of stability as well as the design of the suspension. Currently the entire suspension is only secured with friction; the pieces fitting snuggly together. The problem is under the full weight of the rover, some of the component have a slight sag, which can make the design unstable and could lead to other problems. The good thing however is that this is an easy fix as I will eventually superglue these pieces together creating a very rigid and strong base. The only other issue was with the actual height and angle of the suspension. The problem with the current design is that the rover not very high off of the ground, this is very counterintuitive as providing more room for the suspension to move will make it far easier to overcome obstacles.

After deciding on these major changes to the design, I immediately hopped into cade to begin changing the designs. However, I ended up running into some issues. As I was trying to create a steeper design for the suspension, I decided that I would modify the section to which the motor was mounted, however trying to adjust this part brought a multitude of other problems that I had not originally intended. After scrapping the first plan, I moved on instead to changing the overall angle of the suspension, which turned out working exactly as intended. Now the suspension drops down further, allowing for far more range of motion without getting the main body caught on anything.

old suspension angle

1st attempt

New updated angle