Raven

An update of yesterday's post, I have gotten some more work done on my GPS guided vehicle, which I have also decided to name Raven. I got those mounting holes drilled up for the hardware plate that I mentioned yesterday, and also mounted some electronics to it as well. That was a little interesting, I don't have any circuit board standoffs so I had to get creative. As is usually the case, I ended up building the required parts from modified lego, in this case some small 1x1 stud round "light" pieces. with a hole drilled thru the center. Here are two modified pieces next two unmodified ones:

And them on the screws and Mega:

In addition to the Mega, I also screwed down my ultimate GPS (with more lego spacers) and zip tied on a breadboard for connections. I would have screwed the breadboard on too but the mounting holes were in an inconvinent place. I also mounted my external GPS antenna and it's excessively long connector to the mounting plate:

A closeup of the Mega and the lego standoffs. They actually work very very well:

And the Ultimate GPS mount:

Because the GPS only has two mounting screws, I used a 1x4 and a 2x4 lego plate and drilled in the topmost stud of each so that the plate would support the GPS along it's whole length. I drilled two holes and zip tied the other end as well for security. Lastly, I made a hightened mount for the compass module to keep it far away from the motor and related interference. Of course also out of lego.

Note the GPS antenna on the left side of the picture. It is magnetic and the plate is steel of some sort, so it needs no mounting other than what it has built in. Here is a picture of it mounted on the Flux:

Admittedly, it looks a little goofy in this picture, but it does look better in real life, and besides, I am building a GPS guided vehicle, not a show truck. And it kind of reminds me of the look of a lot of the vehicles that competed in the DARPA Grand Challenge. Form follows function in my opinion. Anyway, no more software progress, this was a hardware night, and thats all for now.