Subterranean investigation device

The heavy lead acids are being reassigned in favour of Li ion 18650's. A set of chargers were built around the mcp73831t 5 pin chip and the batteries sourced from old or unused laptop batteries packs.

The feet for the tracks are also under consideration for a redesign.

There simply are not enough hours in the day.

The fat little bastrd needed some time at fat camp, holes were drilled in the heavy steel cogs as one can see in the photo's. ( What a mess, i made an oil cooler that circulated oil from a tub to the hole cutter and back to the tub. The cog would catch, flinging oil everywhere. Oh, and its used engine oil. Messy messy messy. Did the job though. )

Two 12v 2.1A or such lead acid batteries for power.

Its very slow, works via radio control and has very good night vision. So far so good.

As one can see above, we have a heavy duty tracked replacement for sid the weedy. Metal chain and feet await some kind of foot and the gear box nears completion. Its been a brutal time cutting the boss's off gears, machining shafts and trying to delicately weld the gears with a horrifically over the top welder.  

The radio control system was finally completed. Ill post the code and circuits here because the whole thing was a ball ache to get working. The vehicle that i had made could not handle the battery needed to make it work. It was too heavy and the tracks kept slipping off. A big no no. So im building bigger, better tracks. So in conclusion; electrics good. Mechanics bad.

Working on the wireless control. 2 sets of Uno and rfm12b doing the chatting. Nearly there. The video feed is via a FPV system. The camera plugs in to the tx. The rx is fed through a video to usb converter and viewed on the laptop.