Saturday, November 16, 2013

Today myself, John, Angelo, and Thorsten met around 6:00pm to work on the project.  Our supplies we ordered from Sparkfun have not come in yet, so we are going to wait to work on the Arduino code for the car until they come in.
We began work on the SolidWorks model of the car.  On the Sparkfun website, we found schematics for the motor and made a solid model of one to the specifications in the drawing. We made the motor into an assembly consisting of the following  D-shaped drive shaft and motor body so that the D-shaft will be able to spin once a motor is attached to it in SolidWorks.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ahy3yohgaqz0z5g/Motor%20Body.SLDPRT
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5wd4z9pqvv5xmde/Motor%20D%20shaft.SLDPRT

Together with this motor we made a bracket that will slide into the back end of the motor to connect the motor to the main frame of the car.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/wfo2bu5qgpg7pth/Motor%20Bracket.SLDPRT
We also made a model of the rear wheels we plan to use.  The rear wheels we will be using are Pololu 90x10mm wheels.  We chose these wheels because the drive shaft of the gearmotors we bought are a D-shape meant to fit directly into the Pololu wheels.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/d00nscul2cgtgvt/Back%20Wheel.SLDPRT
We made an assembly of all of these parts that will be later attached to a body.  There will be two of these assemblies, one on each of the two sides of the rear of the car.
With this assembly, when the motor pin is spun, the wheel spins along with it. A video of this will be posted once the final assembly of the car is made.
Together, we worked approximately an hour and a half tonight making these solid models, and the final solid model of the car should be fairly easy to make from here. Drawings have yet to be made for these parts, but should be available in a few days.
We also started looking for options on what to use for our front wheels.  We want the car to be able to turn by simply making the gearmotors on the rear two wheels to spin in opposite directions and in order for this, the front wheels will need to have 360 degree rotation.  We are thinking of using either small swivel wheels similar to those on a computer chair, or small ball casters which both allow this kind of movement.  
Altogether, with the SolidWorks and further brainstorming, we spent about 2-2.5 hours tonight working on the project.

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