Eventually we settled on a design, and started the manufacturing ourselves. Yes we measured, cut, and built everything in lab for the new design.
So with the new design now mounted and Thing 1 rocking a sexy new body we knew we needed to start mounting some sensors on so we could let the software guys go at it. While we were working on getting the sensor mounts manufactured and worked out, we needed to curb down the Rover's raw power a bit. Considering these puppies can get up to 15 mph if they wanted to, though they easily hold steady at 10 mph like no problem, and that the competition said we had to be well below 5 mph we
had some work to do. Ramp down the power of the Rover with out totally messing up the skid steering of the bot, which we had some problem doing. That and the engine kept stalling on hard or sudden changes in directions. After awhile we got all of it figured out and did another couple of test runs, as you can see below. But since we didn't want to mess up the new designed body just yet we used Thing 2 to run the speed, ramping, skid steering, and other hardware tests.
Also we had to design and add an emergency stop button with its own circuit, that though the prototyped circuit worked when it was transferred over just didn't want to play nice
and work for us. After banging out heads against the wall
for quite awhile it finally magically fixed itself and the emergency button was mounted to the back of Thing 1 above the computer. It really has been alot of fun working on this project so far and kind of unnerving at the sametime. This is the first competition of this nature our University has ever entered into, since UAT is actually a new university that's still trying to build up as much steam as some of the bigger names in this area already have. I think being in this will help us alot with that, as long as we finish the track I'll be happy. No meltdowns, no explosions, no burnanation of either Rover at IGVC and I will consider all of my work a success.
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