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Aussie Sawppy - At the Beach

A project log for Aussie Sawppy

An antipodean sibling

teamsgTeamSG 08/10/2020 at 14:303 Comments

We went for a cruise on Trigg Beach, which I wasn't allowed to do apparently. They have a blanket ban on remote controlled devices at the beach - which I understand, but didn't know about. Oops. Soz.

Took some video that wasn't all that interesting, tbh. I'll upload that later.

Took some photos that were more interesting. I guess they show the machine in something like it's final configuration (for now).

Some upgrades since it was moving in basic form.

It's all come together pretty well, although I'm not sure I like the LED mount design in "portrait" mode now that they are fixed to the machine. I think I'll redesign & rotate them 90° to fit them in landscape mode. Filling in some of the gap between the camera mast and the LED mounts will give it a bit more visual weight.

Still some bugs to be worked through. The router is a bit finicky to get up & rolling without mucking about a bit. I had the camera streaming to a smart phone but a ribbon cable mishap seems to have fried the camera electronics and now it's cactus. Didn't even get to test the night vision :(

Regarding the photos, I was trying for something like a real Mars rover's "selfie" style photo using a wide angle lens at the same level as the on-board camera. Kinda worked. Second order effect is that some of the outer edges of the photos look a bit distorted because of the lens.

I have plans to get the rover cruising on some bigger & whiter undisturbed sand dunes in the not too distant future. Pics / video when it happens.

Edit: 

The not-all-that-interesting video...

Discussions

Ameer wrote 08/11/2020 at 18:38 point

It's a great video, useful too as it shows moving on dry sand terrain with occasional extruding rocks, and then onto wet sand.

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Roger wrote 08/11/2020 at 09:08 point

Well, speaking for myself, I found the video very interesting. I haven't run my own Sawppy on that kind of terrain so I was fascinated to see how the suspension handled it.

And that nameplate is fantastic, it never occurred to me to put one on my rover!

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TeamSG wrote 08/11/2020 at 11:21 point

Hey, Roger

I trust you are keeping well amid the strange times we're living through at the moment.

Maybe "not interesting" wasn't a very good description for the video. It was more like that the footage didn't match the vision I had in my head while driving to the beach.

I didn't think the usual, random beach undulations were severe enough to work Sawppy very much.

Probably needs a test course built to get the wheels to move through something closer to their full range of motion.

The nameplate came up nicely. I pinched the idea from some large mining equipment that I did some work on recently.

The old school NASA font with no closed loops makes for a good stencil / cut-out style nameplate.

Cheers,

Jamie

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