Project Logs

Collapse

• Future ideas on mission planning

  R Lang • 04/11/2025 at 12:54 • 0 comments

  So, as it stands my research has kind of hit a bottleneck in that, for now the hardware side of thing has hit the snag of not having a readily accessible 3d printer on which to print and iterate on designs rapidly, so rather than losing momentum I've decided to take a skim at what is available for mission planning. 

  Anyone who grew up in the 80s and 90s in the UK will remember the venerable RM Nimbus running the RM version of the classic programming language Logo. (Perhaps this is where the shape of the turtle subconsciously appeared from when thinking of a friendly shaped line drawing animal?) In the programming language Logo, you were given a turtle shaped animal and a very basic set of commands which commanded the turtle to move in any direction you chose. 

  Shoot forward to today, where the likes of the Nimbus are now museum pieces and we have hardware that are magnitudes more powerful for a fraction of the cost and size, hence why we are able to do projects like this. 

  What I am after is a something that offers similar abilities to logo in that, it needs the minimal of knowledge to accomplish a lot. Examples are out there such as Python Sandbox's turtle mode where a set of very basic commands are able to make basic shapes. But beyond this, how do we go about translating pictures into cartesian coordinates that a robot knows to draw? My research has led me to this pipeline which seems to offer the highest fun to labour ratio for now, given my limited set of skills. 

  Additionally, it then begins the conversation of manual control and how this will be accomplished, but one thing at a time I guess.

• Test Bed

  R Lang • 04/09/2025 at 13:07 • 0 comments

  Although this doesn't represent the finalised design, this is generally the direction I've chosen to go. The idea of this will be to test the ability of Tortuga to drive on sand and to test out a number of things:

  A. Ingress of sand into the electronics

  B. If low pressure, slick tyres will adhere enough on sand 

  C. How accurately can Tortuga steer in such a small form factor.

  My initial thoughts are the front wheel will need more room to manoeuvre - maybe a castor based wheel, if not, depending on the level of difficulty in implementing, regenerative steering/differential steering - the same thing that allows tanks to perform "neutral turns" (tank donuts).

• First things first

  R Lang • 04/08/2025 at 16:34 • 0 comments

  So, I figure this is as good a place as any to start. My background has always been in hardware, going back to a very early and very brief career in engineering, hardware has always just made sense to me. I think its because to me, it's easier to quantify the physical as opposed to the software side which has been more of an abstract to me, I need to understand how X has affects Y for me to physically land it in my head. I digress. 

  Now I've got that off of my chest, let's turn the attention towards the actual design and concept. I wondered, how then should I go about drawing in the sand itself? To my mind, anything sharp or the potential to harm, whilst pretty cool sounding isn't generally what I'd consider to be accessible. So on that note a blunt and rounded off blade was selected as the probable design, printing has yet to begin as I am waylaid by other commitments.  

View all 3 project logs