Last week we made some wheels on the program Solidworks. Then we printed them in 3D.
Before we could put the electronic card  we had to modelize the entire rover on a "modeling" program called solidworks, which despite many quite frankly stupid mechanics, is still a rather good program. But we quickly realized that we weren't going to have enough time to finish the entire rover so we decided to only do the really important pieces which were the wheels and the frame. So after having finished the frame (which we decided to entirely redo), We realised that we were going to need a wheel that could turn so I figured we either use a axel to make the wheel turn, but I figured that it would be easier to use a free wheel. So I spent about an hour working on it until I was told that we didn't actually have to make one because we could just get one from a store. So that was a GIANT waste of time. So after that Lucas did the two back wheels which are now going to print in a 3D printer, which is going to take a few hours. So while we were waiting for that we had to imput an electronic card into the rover to give it a "brain". But before fixing the card to the rover we had to make a program that would enable our dear little rover to get out of a tight spot if it ran into one. To make the program we needed a program called ROOBY which is a thing that enable us to tell our rover what to do by inputing certain variables, those "variables would be two mustache sensors which would be triped whenever the rover hit a wall. ROOBY would let us tell our rover to do stuff like: spin both wheels backwards and that would make the rover reverse  ,spin one wheel backwards and forward which would turn the rover one way or another depending on which wheel went forwards and which one went backwards. but prior to doing that we had to connect the card to the motors, the moustache switches and four batteries. I can't explain how to use ROOBY because it would take too long to expain so I'm just going to put a link to it's user manual which you will find here if you have downloaded ROOBY: C:\Program Files (x86)\Rooby\Help\index.html .









We plugged the card to two motors, two switches, and a four-batteries pod. We are now making a program on Rooby to upload it to the card, in order to make the rover go forward, backward, to make it turn...
To have an idea of the final product, we are using an already made structur and uploading the programs we made to test them

Next step : Our goal is to imput a electronic card into the rover to give it a "brain".
We will

And finaly after a lot of trial and error we finay got our system working. Because at first one of our wheels was blocked by an elastic band. And then we quite a few problems with the motor itself because it just was not working. At first we weren't sure if it was the motor or the panel that wasn't working. But it was the motor and we fixed it.

AND HERE WE GO THE FINAL PRODUCT:

AND THE MOMENT YOU'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR:



And then we FINALY got started on the antiblock system (thanks Vincent) so at first we thought of putting some form of triangle like thing on the front(as shown below) but we scraped that idea in the end because Vincent came up with a much more logical idea, of just inversing the polarity of the motor by flipping a switch which would be linked to a polarity inverser which in turn would be linked to the motor and the solar panel. We started with some sketches:

Then we realised that we were going to have to weld some cable to the actual switch. And for those who were wondering this is how did it:

 

And in the end it looked like this:

And for any sceptics out there it does work!(insert video)

We still had to figure out a way to fix the switch to the rover and a way to flip the switch when it did eventually hit the wall. this is what we came up with:

Yes those are cocktail sticks!
What actually happens is the cocktail sticks will hit the wall and flip the switch which is cunningly put trough the cocktail sticks hole. We did put a second cock tail stick in the opposite direction so that the rover can hit a wall one way and then hit another and jus t go back the other way and can now do that for the rest of eternity.
And we decided that this was probably the best system:

So what we did was put the system you saw above (+the second cocktail stick) through the midle of the rover 

Rotation system

At first we were having problems actually finding a way to make the solar panel rotate because we tried to put the panel on 4 retractable poles. We figured that we make one or more poles longer or shorter than the others which would in turn rotate the panel from side to side. But unfortunatly that didn't work for multiple reasons first of all we couldn't fine any retractable poles and secondly we didn't have a way to move them even if we had them (unfortunatly we don't have any photo sof that idea). So after scraping that idea we figured why not go back to basics and just use good old Lego and we do have photos of that so here they are

What we actualy did was incredibly simple we just took a Lego brick which could pivot from side to side. As shown below:

And then we then put a brick that can  pivot upwards and downwards. As shown below:

And then we put a Lego slab on top with little grooves in them so that we could simply slot the pannel in.

To see the final effect just look at the photos above.



So for anyone who wanted to see the rover prior to the antiblock system was installed and before we found a way to put the pannel on a rotating axe.

So this is how we started:

As oppsed to explaining via an essai (because lets be honnest nobody's got time for that) I'm just going to show you some videos of the assembly.

That system of sloting the motor in was a complete and utter fluke because I wasjust messing around with an elastic band, and thought to myself  "I wonder if i could slot the motoer in there and it turns out I could. So there you go:

We just needed a basic frame for the beggining so I came up with this with some frame blocks that I had at home. But it turns out it was actually a really good frame, and as you'll see we kept that frame throughout the hole prototyping of our rover.  

And just to proove that it works: