Day 4

Today we tested it with the other member of our team who was about 120 miles away. We took the video that is on the website home page. We talked about how we were going to fix the torque problem and decided that we are going to try replacing the resistors. We know that the motors provide plenty of torque when they can draw as much as they want, but our motor controllers have a cap one them. Because we don't want to spend anymore money (its $100-120 for higher rated motor controllers), we are going to try putting in something like 1/2 ohm 15 watt. Right now we have 2 ohms of resistance. We think that will help a little, but we're not sure. We're going to try to get the maximum draw we can with those controllers. Any ideas?

Day 3 of testing: Success!

Tonight we were able to successfully control the Barbie rover from over 1600 miles away. I was with the rover in Florida and another guy who worked on the project was in Bismarck, North Dakota. The test went well and the torque problem wasn't too bad. There are still several bugs I need to work out to get it working the way I want, but the maiden voyage was still exciting to see. I took some video, but since we did the test at night, the street lights turned out to be not bright enough for the camera. We have another test scheduled for Sunday during the day and I will post that video instead.

Day 2 of testing

Today I upgraded the battery from 12v to 18v by putting a 6v battery in series. I also moved the batteries to the middle of the car which seemed to help. There was a definite difference with 18v and it seemed to go a bit faster and have a bit more torque. I was also able to drive the rover over an ad-hoc network. This means that even if there is no wireless access point near, I can still drive it as long as I am in the "bubble" around the rover. I am going to try to output the network to a Linksys WRT54G so that the coverage will be a little larger. I can't use Skype to stream the camera with that setup, but I have been trying to get ZoneMinder working. That way I will be able to connect to the laptop with Hamachi (which is what I am using now) and pull up the control page and the camera feed without having to use VNC or anything. I have been having some trouble getting ZoneMinder to work though. The main problem with the rover now is torque. The only solutions that I can think of are to try to lessen the weight or replace the motors. I have been using modifiedpowerwheels.com to get more ideas. The next step is to try a full scale remote test from North Dakota.

Day 1 of Testing

First successful day of testing. My two friends who are helping me both left today. One is doing a summer semester at college and the other is in vacation in North Dakota. This is a great opportunity to test drive the rover from a long way away. For the first run or two, it went pretty slow and I was unable to get it to drive uphill. So I moved the battery to the front and it helped a little. I was also able to control it over my wireless network. I had my friend in North Dakota run a quick test to make sure that we could run the Arduino from across the internet. He turned an led on and off using my PHP page. I put up the first version of the website as well and posted some videos and pictures.