Week of 5/5

This week I began work on designing the controller. I spent the first portion of the week researching different designs for the controller that I would create. In the first part of this process, I spent some time making a sketch of the controller to give my self a rough guideline for the design. After this I next went into CAD where I started to design the controller. After creating the general shape, I realized that before I make anything else, I needed to create a PCB for it. So before continuing to work on this I only created an outer shell to house the PCB for later once it was time to make one.

After this I next honed into the main decision I had to make in the future design for the controller. The choice was between the two different styles I could use for the control. The first one, and the one I am currently using is a joystick, which is very ergonomic and quite easy to use, however this issue is that the x direction for the two joysticks is not needed as each joystick controls the speed of each side of the vehicle. This gave room to a second idea in which I could use I slide pot the had only linear control, however its downside was that it was quite annoying for controlling the rover and it would be not very ergonomic. Finally after doing some research however I was able to find the perfect solution in which I could use a linear joystick solving both of my problems.

The last thing that I worked on finishing this week was moving all of the different components of the control back across the two separate bread boards for the transmitter and receiver. After doing this I needed to figure out the one issue that remained. The four analog pins I was using for the motors were also being occupied by the receiver. This brought up a major problem as it would mean I would I have to compromise some aspect of the control. After doing research however, I discovered that it was in fact possible to change the orientation of one of the pins on a spot needed to make space for the motor. After adjusting this I have finally moved to testing it, with a few adjustments still necessary before It will work correctly.

Photos: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19AB2-hMwaNp904XZewAQiR4-v4o6LGZQ1X7JISj9YLY/edit?tab=t.0