Lunar Rover progress update

Been a while but here we go!!

So progress on the lunar rover project has been reflective of the once a week meetings - as predicted the comms team merged with control (although there was a proposal to spin off power into its own team).

One of the problems we are facing is that we cannot easily define the boundaries of each team so early in the project. Ideally communications would build the talking bit of the robot, how we get information into and out of the robot including commands, sensor data and possibly images. Control will have to deal with how we use this information on board the rover, including making it move and deploy our sensors. Power will be given a big battery, a bunch of required outputs and told to go sit in a corner and design an interface between the two.

The problem arises when the functionality of one section impact on another. The best example here is the communications potentially impacting on the control system by restricting the amount of information we can feed to the rover.

How do we solve this? It will probably be done gradually, as things start to fall into place the required behaviours of each section will become better defined to the point where sub teams can split off to work on separate project areas.

What has actually happened so far? A bunch of rough proposal work, most teams (including the structural teams) have come up with a rough idea of what they are supposed to be doing and passed on the biggest requirements they can think of to everyone else (including the fact that the payload deployment and drive train will probably mean we have to deal with upwards of 6 motors :| ). Within the control/comms/power team we have come up with some basic control system ideas - and how each have to be supported by the communication and power teams. While Raspberry Pi came up as the immediately obvious solution (you can say it is a proven technology and therefore less risky, as well as being easy-ish to use), someone from the control team found a Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) piloting and control system, a bit pricey but would certainly solve many of our problems at a stroke.

Our next meeting is tomorrow, so ideally there will soon be lots to write about.

3DS Hardmod and Wii Controller Dissassembly

Hi, Andrey over here.

One of my flatmate's Wii Controllers were in quite bad condition after travelling across Asia for a while....

So I took them apart, desoldered the battery contacts and submerged everything but the PCB in soapy water (to remove gunk and alkaline corrotion). Soon I will reassemble them and hopefully there won't be explosions (hehehe).

Also, a couple of weeks ago, I modified my "New 3DS XL" by soldering four wires to the NAND chip test points. The mod allows to copy the firmware directly from the NAND chip by using an SD card reader. With the firmware backed up, many doors for homebrew open up   ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Just One More Resistor Begins...

Here we go!

So, why the blog?
Well, to display some of the insanely cool projects I have managed to throw together (mainly with others) after only a year of studying Electrical and Electronic engineering (time period growing as we go on).

For example, after only 6 months of electronic goodness myself and three others attempted to make a radio telescope as an entry into a 24 hour hackathon. I actually wrote a post somewhere else (here). Surprisingly we did not do too badly, we were not able to get a high enough angular resolution and the weather on the day prevented us from taking it outside and pointing it at the largest object we could find (the sun).

Other projects included an antweight robot wars entry, and a model rocket accelerometer payload.

Coming in the near future are more robots (including fun with servos), and possibly an internet connected coffee machine...