and nasa spent how much on their rovers?
heh heh heh good work, keep it up.

Posted at 10:45 am on Jun 29th, 2009 by AU518987077

Haha, pretty awesome. I like it.
What happens when you get out of wifi range though? :/

Posted at 11:02 am on Jun 29th, 2009 by Shane

im actualy working on one of those but this xbee modems instead of internet

Posted at 12:54 pm on Jun 29th, 2009 by smartchild

shane, the software is designed to keep track of how far away from the router it is and won’t allow the users to go any more past that area outside of a safe wifi connection. couple this with a 3g/edge dongle on the laptop and you have an freeranged unit :)

Posted at 5:01 pm on Jun 29th, 2009 by alex

My first foray into ROVs utilized a two-seater powerwheels barbie jeep.
mine was radio controlled and used a powerful gear motor coupled to the steering shaft.

it was brute-force engineering, as I simply reinforced everything to handle the torque of the motor hitting the limits of the steering.

it all worked splendidly, however it absolutely sucked going over rough terrain because of the plastic wheels.

(i was trying to design something to go off-road and unfortunately it was terrible at it, even when I tried studding the plastic tires.)

If you are staying on fairly even terrain or pavement then these are really cool platforms, but i ended up designing and building my own base using differential (tank-like) steering for my off-road ROV platform.

another advantage to these things is they have their own battery for moving, so you can keep that stuff isolated and get less noise into sensitive systems like micro controllers, sensors and/or video equipment like cameras or transmitters.

Posted at 5:34 am on Jun 30th, 2009 by strider_mt2k

sorry there’s more

awesome use of the swivel up front to give that differential steering.

I really have to pull my ROV out of mothballs one of these days.
Between my netbook and my smartphone’s internet connection my dream of super-long range is actually doable!
(I was using a commercial 2.4ghz video transmitter that limited my range)

also, remember the three laws of robotics when building stuff that has the capability of hurting folks, first law especially.

thanks for getting my brain going, hack a day!

Posted at 5:40 am on Jun 30th, 2009 by strider_mt2k