The Notre Dame Rocketry team competes in the annual NASA Student Launch competition. This year the team chose the deployable rover option for their scoring payload. The objective of the Deployable Rover Payload is to remotely deploy a small rover from the main body of the rocket upon safe landing. Once the rover is deployed it will move five feet away from all points of the rocket and unfold two sets of solar panels.
Our design exceeds the NASA requirements
There are several features we added to the rover in addition to the NASA requirements that we believe make the rover more applicable to interplanetary missions. We have a battery charging IC chip that can take power from the solar panel output to charge the batteries. We utilize LoRa for long range communication of real time data. The solar panels are also used to light an LED. In the original NASA requirements, the solar panels were not required to even be connected.
Some pictures and videos taken during the design process and competition
A Mess™
Electricity is more of a big ball of wirey-electrony...stuff
"Go fish."
An artsy pointless picture of our boards
Can't get too PICk-y
Zyoom
CAD drawing for rover body design
Driving in both orientations
Competition Launch in Huntsville Alabama
Kevin's passions are soldering (arts) and writing documentation (letters).
John's team role was technician. He is primarily interested in high frequency circuit design.
Vinolin's interests include power generation from renewable sources as well as smart grid implementation.
Files for both the prototype and final boards. The final boards consist of the main rover board, the base station, bluetooth modules, and ematch boards.
From the initial project proposal to the final report. We wrote several reports for both the senior design requirements and NASA requirements.
Full code used for the final boards.