Bearings, inserts, nuts and shafts

With the 3D printing out of the way, attention can now turn to starting to assemble all the parts of Sawppy. I already covered the aluminium extrusions which link the parts together, but there are various other bits of hardware needed to keep everything together. Bearings Anywhere where there's a shaft, this project uses inexpensive …

3D printing the Sawppy rover

It's been a few weeks since the last post, but here's why - I've been busy printing: What you see above is the result of almost 144 hours of print time and 792 metres of plastic (or the best part of 3 reels). Firstly, whilst the original Sawppy was designed and iterated using PLA plastic, …

Cutting some aluminium

The main frame of the Sawppy rover uses off the shelf aluminium extrusions from Misumi, so I thought I'd start with these. After creating a company account with Misumi I ordered 2 x 2m lengths. £16.52 spent and a couple of days later, they arrived. Following Roger's instructions, I started to lay out how to …

Sawppy the rover

At some point last year I discovered that NASA had released some plans for an Open Source build-it-yourself rover, based on the Curiosity design. Feel free to take a look at it here. Even though it uses mostly off the shelf parts, the estimated cost to make yourself one still comes in at around $2500 …