Mars Rover

Hello, 

My apologies, I hate when people also post just designs with no hardware. However fear not I have finally got the right motors and event to get this rover made. I'm part of the St. Louis Robotics Club and there is a First Friday @ the Science Center coming up this Friday. (the theme is "The Martian")  I was able to get the rover going in the last two weeks. So far i have printed everything and assembled the rolling chassis. I have also spent time on the control system which for more audience/kid interaction I made it RC, tank steerable with front facing LED lights. 

This will be 6 wheel drive and is intended to go in a lunar regolith test bed. 

I was able to test the RC side electronics, I now need to work on the battery/switch and DC-DC convertor. 

Here is a current progress picture of the rover. 

I have worked a lot with the overall design in CAD, (Autodesk Fusion 360). Since the motors are rather expensive at ~17 bucks a pop this will not be a cheap project. To that end, I decided I might as well put some sealed ball bearings in at the articulation point. Also no self respecting rover is without environmental sensors so I will load it up with Temperature/Barometric pressure with a BMP180 and a lux sensor. I might throw in a small OLED to display the data. This is adding up a bit so I will be looking into a nice custom PCB that I can solder to. Might just have to relabel this as a actual rover ready for the moon or mars lol. 

Next Steps:

The next step is to start printing out the chassis parts and see if things are fitting in the real world. 

The newest design is below. Let me know what you guys think. 

Forever waiting on the dome...

Enjoy!

Apollo