Day 12

Today has been busy with the added duties of dish washing and man did it feel like the dishes were never ending, but with the help of the crew they got done!  The Cool Robot was driven with all 5 solar panel hooked up and it didn't catch fire, but had some really bad steering happening which was not fun to drive.  While I was finishing up the dishes from lunch Jim and Ben drove the robot back to the barn.  When I joined up with the crew Ben told me the bad news that he snap the front support bracket off the support rib and just has he was telling that news Jim discovered that one of the wheels had come uncoupled from the motor, that is why it was steering like crap!  At first everything sounded really bad but taking a moment to think about the problem they turned out not that hard to fix.  The robot will be ready to drive again by tomorrow morning.  The motor coupling just need to be tightened, not easy to get to, but way better than removing the boost converters to get the motor mounts!  The bracket was just taken off and reworked and epoxy back on, good as new!  Later I worked on trying to get the control board to send the data of the motors and GPS over to the datalogger only to determine that there is some timing issue within the code that Jim and I will work through tomorrow morning when we are less frustrated with it.

Left: Jim work to tighten the motor coupling.
Top: Jim's view for getting to the coupling.

Left: Ben scraping the old epoxy off the support bracket.
Top: Allison scraping the old epoxy off the support.