Author: Kevin Boyle

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Our new 8 wheel chassis is now rolling. The minor problems we wrote about yesterday were resolved and everything came together.  We all spent a lot of time in the garage yesterday–especially Mr. Anderson.  The result looks...

Today we finished the fabrication of the drive bays, which is the most complex part of our 8 wheel drive chassis.  We have an alignment problem with a few of the chain hubs, but it looks to be solvable pretty quickly.  Which is good.  Tick, tock. We also got a final plan for our new compact electronics bay.  We should be able to cut that out tomorrow and get things mounted. Here are some pictures of the assembled drive bays with one of the cross-members to give an idea of the appearance of the final...

We got a got done this week (instead of just designing and planning). Among other things: We designed a new electronics deck to fit with our 8 wheel drive chassis.  We had to cut the size by two thirds.  To make it fit we are using both sides of the deck and will have a kid plate to protect the bottom side.  We’ll put the motor controllers and power distribution box on the bottom as we don’t think we’ll need to get to them to often.  If we do, for bolts will give us access. We finished programming (pretty much) for teleoperated mode.  We added a precision mode to our drive system and got controllers working for our two arm motors (including precision modes for them).  All that is left is to add a control for the trunk release solenoid we’re going to use for our boulder flicker. We finished fabrication of our lacrosse style boulder grabber and tosser.  Mr. Anderson did a lot of work on this. The parts for our 8 wheel drive chassis finally arrived.  We have gobs of 5×2 C-channel and 5×1 rectangle stock.  We bgean fabrication of the new chassis this weekend.  We got a lot done, but there is a lot to do. Mr. Anderson welded the gears onto our wheel hubs.  It is nice to have that task out of the way....