BACKLOG! Nameless Microwave Upgrades

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.

BOCKLOG! Nameless Microwave & the IGVC

So IGVC is a robotics competition, well an intelligent ground competition to be exact. The challenge is to design, build, and compete with a mobile autonomous vehicle that you're team came up with. So for our entry we picked the name Nameless Microwave thanks to a random punk band name generator, and we were off like a rocket with design for the bot. Now in the lab there had been these Rovers that had just been sitting there for god knows how long to the point where there speed belts were gone, there was a leak in the hydraulic pump and no one could remember if they ran or not since they hadn't been taken outside in forever. We decided to use these as our base for our competition bot and since the lab conveniently had two of these things laying around we were going to make carbon copy bots just on the outside chance we had a complete hardware meltdown while at the competition. And so the Nameless Microwaves gained the bots affectionately known as Thing 1 and Thing 2. Once again being the hardware lead [what can I say I like have a tangible finished project] I had to get these bots to the point where they actually ran so that we could start designing and changing them while maintaining an inherent base functionality. So my hardware team and I went grease monkeys for awhile and changed speed belts, plugged the hydraulic pump leaks, got the motor running, secured gas lines [yes it is gas powered] till we finally got it running. YAY! So the video below is a little old but I remembered I had already posted it somewhere, so its a video of after we'd gotten everything repaired and running to show it could work. I'll try and put up some more recent stuff once I get done with a demo run of another project I'm doing. ^^