Week of 9/29

This week I spent a lot of time working on redesigning the wheels on my rover. Originally, I was not entirely sure what the best design was, so I simply left it untouched until it was necessary to work on them once again. Now that the time had came, I knew I had to make some modifications. The main thing I wanted to do was cut down the overall volume of the wheels. This step was important as I thought it would be a good idea to cut some extra weight off of the suspension. Besides this I overall added some extra fillets and smoothed out the design to look far more sleek and well designed.

The next order in business was to begin work on getting all of the motor set up and attached. After searching through the supply closet I came to the conclusion that there were no pre-soldered motors left. This brought me to the conclusion that I was going to need to solder them myself. Firstly, I measured and cut all of the wire that I need, making sure to cut them long so they could fully reach the breadboard from the suspension. After this step was fully finished I stripped the ends of the wire, providing connect for when I soldered. The soldering process did not take very long. I thought it would take a while, but everything ended up going very smoothly. Lastly, I went through all of the different motors, testing each of them to ensure that they all worked, which they all did.

Currently attached motors

Soldered motors

As of creating this blog, I am still waiting for the 3d printed wheel to be fully finished. Once done, I will be able to start the process of printing all of the other wheel and test the rover for the first time!