This week I spent the majority of my time designing and finalizing the mechanical CAD for the drive train of the rover. I spent a lot of time working on creating the belt system to allow us to drive the rover with two motors. I had to do a lot of designing and redesigning to be able to fit everything on the rover and I have imported the footprints in for the electronic components we plan on putting on the rover. I am currently designing footprints for modules to hold the electronics as well as finding a premade belt that works with the pulley system our wheels have. Below is the design for the dead-shaft drive train module:
Below is the live-shaft drive train module:
I also worked on the PCB some more and found some sources that have made game controllers using an Arduino. I have started experimenting with an Arduino and analog components to bring our basic PCB design to life in a practical and fast manner. Now that the rover is almost entirely designed I need to begin looking at kinematic calculations and how to perform them internally on the Raspberry Pi.
I am slightly behind on schedule from where I should be; however, the next three weeks on the schedule are fabricating the rover. Given that the majority of our parts need to be 3D printed we will have a lot of time between prints and assembly that I can put towards getting caught up on the embedded software side involving kinematic calculations. The next 24 hours will be spent finalizing the design review presentation and making sure that our design is robust and in a good place to pitch to the class.