Upgrading Rover: Kabuto

Rover: Kabuto new frame

Remember when I said that I will upgrade the chasis of my rovers? I’ve finally did it!

It is still half done, but I would like to share the journey that I made so far.

Born of the Firebug rover or an old friend is back

Yesterday we went to our evil genius friend  to ask him to make a new rover for us. Instead of making a new one we ended up reviving an old rover.

This rover was our robot in the competition of Magyarok a Marson 2011 (Hungarian on Mars). The competition was similar to a capture the flag game, with four rovers on the field at the same time.
We weren’t that experienced that time (and our budge was low) so the project failed. We were good in the first round but unfortunately at the second round some smoke has been made and the motorcontroller went to the robo-heaven. Also we smoked an 25A car fuse, yeah something was very bad in our design. We didn’t have the automatic control in time so we used the manual version. In this case we had to use 15 sec delay between two command to follow the rules. We started the blog roughly after two months to the competition. Here is a picture of the rover at that time.

Building a Rover project day 7 – assembly 2

Since now we have the wifi working, continuing the effort of last time we finally got to do the next assembly step.

Mounting the BeagleBone on the rover.

It was no big deal.

4 screws to fix the BeagleBone onto the plastic board, some tape for a USB hub and some ideas to hide those way too long USB cables somewhere.

The camera is just for prank, we will have to think of a place to put it, and also a way to hide it’s cable.

Building a Rover project day 3 – assembly

We managed to set everything up separately so it’s now time to assemble the robot!

Instead of the cool 4×4 truck top I put this plastic panel for now:

Building a Rover project day 0

It’s summer time! Best way to spend it, to hide from the sun inside in your room and create rover. Our first rover will be the Scarabeus! It will be created from an RC car (which we bougth from local supermarket). We tried it without customizing anything of it, here you can see the video: