Just finished up for the day with Thunder Down Under. After an initial 3 days of design, followed by 12 days of building, today we did our first integration test of the controls hardware with our robot base.
We got our controls board secured to the robot base, our operator interface connected to the robot controls hardware through the wireless link, and managed to drive it around. Carefully. 
I may be biased as a mentor, but I think this is a great effort by a rookie team, on our own here in Australia (with long distance help from Team Pheonix), where we have to chase kangaroos out of the shed just to get to our tools!! (Ok, not really…)
For those interested, here’s a link to a video of today’s test. http://www.youtube.com/user/roboroos
Oh look, my post finally turned up.
This already has another thread over here.
Hi Steve
Looks great. Nice clean design.
I have one question. What drove the offset wheel design?
That’s a great video. The students are priceless throughout. Good luck, and hope to see you in Atlanta someday.
Looks great!
The first moment of everything working fells really good. Now you even have a few weeks left to test, improve, and learn how to fix what breaks
My guess on the offset wheels is that you are waiting for more parts to show up. If that’s true, the offset wheel design is a clever way to keep the process moving, since you can still drive it this way.
It’s because the other 2 wheels didn’t have bearings.
Some pretty good ideas hope to see at IRI someday
So, for those of you who don’t know the story, here it is.
The problem was Steve tried to post our driving robot when it happened, but he didn’t have enough posts. I posted it on behalf of then team, and once Steve got enough posts, well this thread appeared out of nowhere–as you can tell by the time stamp on the first post.
I hope you all enjoy watching our robot again. And, here is another video done by our film crew, it shows what we have done up to this point in time.
Excellent video, and from what I can tell, excellent team! Follow through during the competition season. You have a very talented film crew.
We’ll be rooting for you guys.
Rick, you forgot all the little deadly critters they have!
Looking good 3132!
