TeamSGWe went for a cruise on Trigg Beach, which I wasn't allowed to do apparently. They have a blanket ban on remote controlled devices at the beach - which I understand, but didn't know about. Oops. Soz.
Took some video that wasn't all that interesting, tbh. I'll upload that later.
Took some photos that were more interesting. I guess they show the machine in something like it's final configuration (for now).
Some upgrades since it was moving in basic form.
- Some reprints to drop a bit of yellow and improve the colour balance
- On-board wifi router for extra range
- Nameplate on the router casing to advertise the franchise
- Dedicated RasPi stacked battery pack
- Curiosity-esque wheels & tyres (front right destroyed later in the day)
- Hex drive shafts (can't see them but they performed perfectly)
- Pi Camera with night vision / IR LEDs
It's all come together pretty well, although I'm not sure I like the LED mount design in "portrait" mode now that they are fixed to the machine. I think I'll redesign & rotate them 90° to fit them in landscape mode. Filling in some of the gap between the camera mast and the LED mounts will give it a bit more visual weight.
Still some bugs to be worked through. The router is a bit finicky to get up & rolling without mucking about a bit. I had the camera streaming to a smart phone but a ribbon cable mishap seems to have fried the camera electronics and now it's cactus. Didn't even get to test the night vision :(
Regarding the photos, I was trying for something like a real Mars rover's "selfie" style photo using a wide angle lens at the same level as the on-board camera. Kinda worked. Second order effect is that some of the outer edges of the photos look a bit distorted because of the lens.
I have plans to get the rover cruising on some bigger & whiter undisturbed sand dunes in the not too distant future. Pics / video when it happens.
Edit:
The not-all-that-interesting video...
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It's a great video, useful too as it shows moving on dry sand terrain with occasional extruding rocks, and then onto wet sand.
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Well, speaking for myself, I found the video very interesting. I haven't run my own Sawppy on that kind of terrain so I was fascinated to see how the suspension handled it.
And that nameplate is fantastic, it never occurred to me to put one on my rover!
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Hey, Roger
I trust you are keeping well amid the strange times we're living through at the moment.
Maybe "not interesting" wasn't a very good description for the video. It was more like that the footage didn't match the vision I had in my head while driving to the beach.
I didn't think the usual, random beach undulations were severe enough to work Sawppy very much.
Probably needs a test course built to get the wheels to move through something closer to their full range of motion.
The nameplate came up nicely. I pinched the idea from some large mining equipment that I did some work on recently.
The old school NASA font with no closed loops makes for a good stencil / cut-out style nameplate.
Cheers,
Jamie
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