Pathfinder Generation #5
Pathfinder Final Blog Post – Spring 2018
By: Jordan Smallwood (PM) Approved By: Miguel Garcia (Quality Assurance) Pathfinder Team: Jordan Smallwood (PM) Diane Kim (E&C) Mohamad Yakoub (MST) Adolfo Jimenez (Manufacturing) Table of Contents Executive Summary: By: Jordan Smallwood (PM) Mission Objective: Figure 1: Final Course Outline The Spring of 2018 Pathfinder will follow the path laid down by previous Pathfinders. The […]
Final Arduino Code
By: Jordan Smallwood (Project Manager) Approved By: Miguel Garcia (Quality Assurance) Table of Contents 6-Wheel Differential: The six-wheel differential takes advantage of pin-change interrupts since most of the external interrupt pins are lodged within communication pins on the ATMega 2560. The way it works can be viewed here. Currently we are experiencing difficulties getting the software to […]
Final Pathfinder Design
Author: Adolfo Jimenez (Manufacturing Engineer) Verified By: Jordan Smallwood (Project Manager) Approved By: Miguel Garcia (Quality Assurance) Table of Contents Introduction: Figure 1: Isometric View of the Pathfinder Robot Many modifications were made to our original designs of the pathfinder rover. These designs were implemented to accommodate the requirements of the rover being able to […]
PCB Fabrication
Author: Diane Kim (Division Manager of E&C Hardware) Verified By: Jordan Smallwood (Project Manager) Approved By: Miguel Garcia (Quality Assurance) Table of Contents Introduction To fabricate our board, we use a PCB fabrication machine called the V-One from Voltera. Its function includes printing, soldering, and drilling. Printing V-One uses conductive ink to print the traces […]
Solar Panel Charging
By: Mohammad Yakoub (Mission, Systems, and Testing) Verified By: Jordan Smallwood (Project Manager) Approved By: Miguel Garcia (Quality Assurance) Table of Contents Introduction The objective of this blog post to find a way to charge the main battery with the solar panel cells. There are different ways to go about this, but I found that […]
Stepper Motor Study
By: Adolfo Jimenez (Manufacturing) Verified By: Jordan Smallwood (Project Manager) Approved By: Miguel Garcia (Quality Assurance) Table of Contents Introduction In order to test the articulation of the solar panels before they were assembled onto the chassis an EasyDriver stepper motor driver was used to run and test the motors, and thus by extension the […]
Custom PCB for Solar Panels
Author: Diane Kim (Division Manager of E&C Hardware) Verified By: Jordan Smallwood (Project Manager) Approved By: Miguel Garcia (Quality Assurance) Table of Contents Introduction The second PCB is for the solar panels which consists of the connection for the stepper motor drivers (3), current sensors (6), and GPIO expander. We are using the stepper motor […]
Custom Chassis PCB
Author: Diane Kim (Division Manager of E&C Hardware) Verified By: Jordan Smallwood (Project Manager) Approved By: Miguel Garcia (Quality Assurance) Table of Contents Introduction Unlike many of the other projects that are required to use the 3DoT board, we will be using the ATMega 2560 due to a large amount of connections. Since many of […]
Motor-Mock Up
By: Jordan Smallwood (Project Manager) Approved by: Miguel Garcia (Quality Assurance) Table of Contents Introduction One of the requirements of the Pathfinder is to determine whether a no-load condition is present, we needed to define what that condition is. In order to test the characteristics of our motor a simple experiment was conducted. The idea […]
No-Load ISR
By: Jordan Smallwood (Pathfinder Project Manager and Electronics & Control) Approved By: Miguel Garcia (Quality Assurance) Table of Contents Introduction: The idea is that if any of our motors are under a no-load condition we want to cease power to that motor, since it makes no sense to waste power on a freely spinning motor. […]