26/06/2019
Agenda:
- Check on the rotatable turntable on whether it fits
- Read up on and make any modifications needed for the audio, IMU and servo motor
Tasks Accomplished:
- Collected the mount for the servo motor
- Made changes to the design of the rotatable turntable to ensure transceiver fits but not too tightly
- Researched on IMU and servo motor to see how they work
- Tried to modify the servo motor such that it turns 360 degrees, but it did not work well (we are deciding whether to buy a 360 rotatable servo motor)
We 3D printed the mount for the servo motor tester we got from Tony to hold the servo motor in place in the chassis (and it fits)! However, we faced another larger problem instead which is that the servo motor is made such that it can only turn 240 degrees so the turntable will not be able to move 360 degrees (one full round). After some research, we found that there is a 360 continuous servo motor which we are considering whether to buy. Tony has a smaller motor (but we estimate that it is too small to carry and move the load of the transceiver). We did consider using a stepper motor, but the weight of the stepper motor is so much larger than the servo motor (we can feel the difference just by holding them) and will probably consume much more power and make our tank so much heavier. 😢
We tried opening the servo motor (the tester given to us by Tony) to change the angle that it can rotate and realised that there is a pin which blocks the rotation of the gear at after a certain angle so we tried removing the pin. And we went on to trying to solder the circuit boards in the servo motor but we realised we soldered the wires wrongly as we made the servo motor rotate 360 continuously instead and when we tried to re-solder the servo motor back to its original state, the servo motor could not work according to the code either (and we did not know how to rotate the servo motor backwards either).
We realise the transceiver does not fit snugly into the 3D designed turntable and we had to make adjustments to the design to give more space to the transceiver. We also designed some parts to hold the turntable better on the platform. Below are images of the 2nd and more successful design of the turntable as well as the stabilisers to hold the turntable in place. Most of the design remained unchanged except for the dimensions.
There is still quite a bit left to do but we needed to first research on how to get the audio and video right first so here we go! 🚗 🚕 🚙