Rover, Red Rover

You ask, “Why start building a landing craft for NASA for our first 3d project”. Well, Dad always said, “Aim high, hit high. Aim low, hit low.” Or was it Mom that said that? Not sure. Anyway, after seeing ‘The Martian’ I think NASA needs all the help it can get. Plus we are going to make a rover that plants potato eyes in human poop so that we can eat them. Yum!

There are a few ways that we can approach this build. One, we can go down to JPL and steal one of their prototypes and scan it into a 3d scanner that will provide a file that can be converted into a different file which can them be compiled into a language that can be interpreted by Java which then can be recompiled into c++. Then, a miracle happens and we get a .stl file for Cura to drive the printer. Of course, by then we are in jail facing grand theft and country endangerment charges by HLS.

Two, we can Google ‘Mars Rover’ and get many pictures of Pathfinder, Sidewinder and Self-Winder, one of which actually made it onto an Atlas rocket a few years back. Here is a great picture of one of the ‘winders’ that we can use to model our rover from.

 

Now we just have to use 123d and design all of the 3,765 parts that you see in the picture.

A third way to build our rover replica is to find some open source files placed on the net by real rocket scientists who actually made such a replica. We can start by searching ‘Thingiverse’ website for such files. After a couple of hours of searching we find there is quite a range in the quality of rover models to choose from.

Not Exactly What We Were Looking For

To cut to the chase, I will choose to download some files and design some of our own unique parts for rover from both these downloaded files as well as self-created parts using 123d. Why? Because our rover is going to actually run with remote control and be battery driven with solar recharging just like NASA required in the original RFQ. (Request For Quote) You didn’t get a RFQ. No problem. I did.