DroneNet: The Quad Chronicles

Well what is more fun that designing your own PCB's for your projects? 

Actually getting them back, soldering them, and seeing them work. I am going to try and compile all of our PCB's here in case anyone wants to see them. I can send the full eagle files if needed as well. 

Here is the controller that we used for the Rover. It was designed in DesignSpark by Allied Electronics. 

Here is the Mecanum IO Controller. We designed the Motor Drivers to be modular from the actual micro controller just in case anything went wrong, we wouldn't be down an entire board. 

fresh from fab! OSHPARK ftw. 

These are the Motor Driver boards. We put 2 IC's on each board, using a total of 2 boards. (left and right sides). I used Sparkfun's MonsterMoto as a reference and mostly just redid the routing on it and adjusted it to fit my sockets so it would mate directly to the controller board.

The next set of boards are what we used for the Peripheral's on the Rover and also our communication handler for all the boards on the rover.

The boards were designed to stack on top of each other, very similiar to an arduino shield. They are connected via an I2C bus (the headers towards the back right). They are using a switching regulator power supply and each board is able to handle up to 3 amps for all of the servos. 

Last but not least, the PCB that runs the Bedini Motor. I will have to get some pictures of the PCB design once I get the files.

We ended up getting a lot of attention for the project and were asked to present at the 6th Annual National Symposium on Renewable and Sustainable Energy. We decided it would be time to start looking more into aesthetics...

And so the shell was born. Raymond Lueg created this masterpiece from the ground up out of 1/2" birch. When he finished, we started molding all of the sections together  to make it look like one solid piece of material. 

wetsanding the black primer....

And after some layers of paint!

After we painted it, we realized we wanted to do some more with it. So we took a router and routed out a front to imitate the Cylon Eye from Battlestar. For this effect we used a 2-way Mirror film so that it will look like a regular piece of mirror plexi, until we turn it in. (Also big thanks to Adafruit and their Neopixels!). I will go into a little more about the neopixels later on and what we did with them. 

Well after we kept running into issues we decided to take a whole new approach. As much as we love the tank tread, we decided to go with something even more epic. We went with Andymark Mecanum wheels along with Andymark motors for them. This gave us tons of more freedom in driving and the ability to move in any direction we wanted. This became very important for us when we wanted to be able to "catch" the quad when landing. 

We also then rebuilt the controller...

I bent the plexiglass with a heat gun.

We started this project for our Senior Design Project. The project includes 4 Electrical Engineering majors. We decided we wanted to build something that was awesome, had a lot of real world applications, contained a good amount of design work and would be really fun to build. These are our early pictures and prototypes to show the progress throughout the whole build. 

Here is the Initial Prototype platform...

We then scaled it up to a wider tank tread and ran into huge issues with the torque on our motors (which is why we ended up going to the mecanum wheels you will see later).

And the initial prototype for the controller..