Week of 10/6

Throughout this week, I have made many new major strides in getting the rover prototype completed. At the start of this week, I worked on getting all six of the motors completely mounted onto the rover as I was waiting for the 3d printer to be finished so that I would be able to print the rest of my wheels. To get these motors ready to be mounted, I first started by crimping all of the wires and then attaching the female connector piece. Once this was complete I next moved on to finding all of the nuts and bolts to attach the motors in place. This ended up taking far longer than I anticipated due to the low supply of the specific bolt I needed, forcing me to search all throughout the shop to find the correct length bolts. After this was complete, I was finally able to 3d print the rest of the wheels, then turning my attention back to the software of the rover.

While the motors were printing, I pulled out the breadboards with the transmitter and receiver I had been testing from the end of last year. After fully hooking up all of the motors and sending power to each breadboard, It seemed that it would be able to fully work, with there being a few minor signal misinputs. However during the following day, as I was continuing to test the breadboards, all of a sudden, the signal went completely dead, with the motors aimlessly turning without following the command of the joysticks. At first I thought it was maybe just a wire that had been unplugged, however after looking through absolutely all of the different components I realized it must have been something else. After carefully eliminating each factor, and going through the code numerous times, I concluded that it was a problem with the transmitter and receiver hardware. This turned out to be the case, as after I replaced both, the signal began to send once again. Finally, after fully attaching the wheels, I was able to test the rover for the very first time... And it works! I did not have much time to test all of its capabilities as I did not apply traction to all of the wheel, but I am happy to say that all of the motor and driving functions are working perfectly as intended and I am excited to see where the project goes next.