Maker Mellow was inspired by watching the progress of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover and wanted in on the interplanetary robot scene. Their first idea was to build a scale version of Perseverance, but when their partner stepped in to suggest that starting smaller might be a little easier, Zippy was born.
ProtoTank (a bolt-together modular tank-style robotics platform)
Inside Zippy
Zippy’s basic parts haven’t changed much through its three iterations. You can follow the journey of Zippy 1.0 through 3.0 on Mellow’s website. You’ll see that some additional hardware was required when Mellow made some improvements.
Baby Zippy
The first version of Mellow’s mini Mars rover was just a motor on a 3D-printed body, controlled by plugging in wires to the battery. But Mellow was desperate to level up their robot and build something that could be controlled by an Xbox controller. They reached that goal with Zippy 2.0 and can drive the mini Mars rover remotely via Bluetooth. However, the range is quite tight, so slow runners need not apply for the job of pilot.
Zippy 3.0 comes complete with a DJI Osmo Action camera to capture its adventures.
Baby Zippy 1.0 playing on the carpet
What surfaces can Zippy ride on?
Our favourite part of Mellow’s original project post is the list rating how good Zippy is at navigating various types of terrain (some of which are showcased in the video up top):
Sand – NO it gets stuck in the wheels
Big rocks – NO the robot is too low to the ground and gets stuck
Pebbles – with determination
Grass – only very short grass
Human bodies – surprisingly well
Carpets – Zippy loves carpets
Flat terrain – definitely
Zippy 2.0 out on the road
Here’s all the code you need to build your own mini Mars rover.
Follow the real thing on Mars
Keep up with NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover on Twitter. Perseverance spent its summer drilling into rocks, and has photos to prove it.
Inspired by NASA’s attempt to launch a helicopter on Mars, one maker made an Earth-bound one of her own. And she tells Rosie Hattersley all about it in the latest issue of The MagPi Magazine, out now.
To avoid being swiped by the drone’s rotors, the Raspberry Pi 4, which uses NASA’s especially written F Prime code for telemetry, had to be positioned very carefully
Like millions of us, in April Avra Saslow watched with bated breath as NASA’s Perseverance rover touched down on the surface of Mars.
Like most of us, Avra knew all about the other ground-breaking feat being trialled alongside Perseverance: a helicopter launch called Ingenuity, that was to be the first flight on another planet – “a fairly lofty goal”, says Avra, since “the atmosphere on Mars is 60 times less dense than Earth’s.”
With experience of Raspberry Pi-based creations, Avra was keen to emulate Ingenuity back here on earth.
Avra’s videographer colleague lent her the drone that enables Epigone to achieve lift-off
NASA chose to use open-source products and use commercially available parts for its helicopter build. It just so happened that Avra had recently begun working at SparkFun, a Colorado-based reseller that sells the very same Garmin LIDAR-Lite v3 laser altimeter that NASA’s helicopter is based on. “It’s a compact optical distance measurement sensor that gives the helicopter ‘eyes’ to see how far it hovers above ground,” Avra explains.
NASA posted the Ingenuity helicopter’s open-source autonomous space-flight software, written specifically for use with Raspberry Pi, on GitHub. Avra took all this as a sign she “just had to experiment with the same technology they sent to Mars.”
F Prime and shine
Her plan was to see whether she could get GPS and lidar working within NASA’s framework, “and then take the sensors up on a drone and see how it all performed in the air.” Helpfully, NASA’s GitHub post included a detailed F Prime tutorial based around Raspberry Pi. Avra says understanding and using F Prime (F´) was the hardest part of her Epigone drone project. “It’s a beast to take on from an electronics enthusiast standpoint,” she says. Even so, she emphatically encourages others to explore F´ and the opportunity to make use of NASA’s code.
NASA recognises that Raspberry Pi offers a way to “dip your toe in embedded systems,” says Avra, and “encourages the idea that Linux can run on two planets in the solar system”
Raspberry Pi 4 brain
The Epigone Drone is built around Raspberry Pi 4 Model B; Garmin’s LIDAR-Lite v4, which connects to a Qwiic breakout board and has a laser rather than an LED; a battery pack; and a DJI Mini 2 drone borrowed from a videographer colleague. Having seen how small the drone was, Avra realised 3D-printing an enclosure case would make everything far too heavy. As it was, positioning the Epigone onto its host drone was challenging enough: the drone’s rotors passed worryingly close to the project’s Raspberry Pi, even when precisely positioned in the centre of the drone’s back. The drone has its own sensors to allow for controlled navigation, which meant Avra’s design had to diverge from NASA’s and have its lidar ‘eyes’ on its side rather than underneath.
Although her version piggybacks on an existing drone, Avra was amazed when her Epigone creation took flight:
“I honestly thought [it] would be too heavy to achieve lift, but what do ya know, it flew! It went up maybe 30 ft and we were able to check the sensors by moving it close and far from the SparkFun HQ [where she works].”
While the drone’s battery depleted in “a matter of minutes” due to its additional load, the Epigone worked well and could be deployed to map small areas of land such as elevation changes in a garden, Avra suggests.
The MagPi #107 out NOW!
You can grab the brand-new issue right now from the Raspberry Pi Press store, or via our app on Android or iOS. You can also pick it up from supermarkets and newsagents. There’s also a free PDF you can download.
Quite possibly the coolest thing we saw Raspberry Pi powering this year was ISS Mimic, a mini version of the International Space Station (ISS). We wanted to learn more about the brains that dreamt up ISS Mimic, which uses data from the ISS to mirror exactly what the real thing is doing in orbit.
The ISS Mimic team’s a diverse, fun-looking bunch of people and they all made their way to NASA via different paths. Maybe you could see yourself there in the future too?
Dallas Kidd
Dallas (in the green t shirt) having a lark with teammate Estefannie. Safety first!
Dallas Kidd currently works at the startup Skylark Wireless, helping to advance the technology to provide affordable high speed internet to rural areas.
Previously, she worked on traffic controllers and sensors, in finance on a live trading platform, on RAID controllers for enterprise storage, and at a startup tackling the problem of alarm fatigue in hospitals.
Before getting her Master’s in computer science with a thesis on automatically classifying stars, she taught English as a second language, Algebra I, geometry, special education, reading, and more.
Her hobbies are scuba diving, learning about astronomy, creative writing, art, and gaming.
Tristan Moody
That’s Tristan on the right. NASA does not currently hire small children.
Tristan Moody currently works as a spacecraft survivability engineer at Boeing, helping to keep the ISS and other satellites safe from the threat posed by meteoroids and orbital debris.
He has a PhD in mechanical engineering and currently spends much of his free time as playground equipment for his two young kids.
Estefannie is a software engineer, designer, punk rocker and likes to overly engineer things and document her findings on her YouTube and Instagram channels as Estefannie Explains It All.
Estefannie spends her time inventing things before thinking, soldering for fun, writing, filming and producing content for her YouTube channel, and public speaking at universities, conferences, and hackathons.
She lives in Houston, Texas and likes tacos.
Douglas Kimble
Where are the dogs, Douglas?!
Douglas Kimble currently works as an electrical/mechanical design engineer at Boeing. He has designed countless wire harness and installation drawings for the ISS.
He assumes the mentor role and interacts well with diverse personalities. He is also the world’s biggest Lakers fan living in Texas.
His favorite pastimes includes hanging out with his two dogs, Boomer and Teddy.
Craig Stanton
Craig’s knows what’s up. Or knows a secret. We can’t tell. Maybe both?
Craig’s father worked for the Space Shuttle program, designing the ascent flight trajectories profiles for the early missions. He remembers being on site at Johnson Space Center one evening, in a freezing cold computer terminal room, punching cards for a program his dad wrote in the early 1980s.
Craig grew up with LEGO and majored in Architecture and Space Design at the University of Houston’s Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA).
His day job involves measuring ISS major assemblies on the ground to ensure they’ll fit together on-orbit. Traveling to many countries to measure hardware that will never see each other until on-orbit is the really coolest part of the job.
Sam Treagold
Sam: not to be trusted with hardware you don’t want shot in the desert
Sam Treadgold is an aerospace engineer who also works on the Meteoroid and Orbital Debris team, helping to protect the ISS and Space Launch System from hypervelocity impacts. Occasionally they take spaceflight hardware out to the desert and shoot it with a giant gun to see what happens.
In a non-pandemic world he enjoys rock climbing, music festivals, and making sound-reactive LED sunglasses.
Chen Deng
Chen showing off the very shiniest part of the ISS Mimic (solar panels)
Chen Deng is a Systems Engineer working at Boeing with the International Space Station (ISS) program. Her job is to ensure readiness of Payloads, or science experiments, to launch in various spacecraft and operations to conduct research aboard the ISS.
The ISS provides a very unique science laboratory environment, something we can’t get much of on earth: microgravity! The term microgravity means a state of little or very weak gravity. The virtual absence of gravity allows scientists to conduct experiments that are impossible to perform on earth, where gravity affects everything that we do.
In her free time, Chen enjoys hiking, board games, and creative projects alike.
Bryan Murphy
Bryan, adorned with an LED necklace, posing next to ISS Mimic’s rotating solar panel ‘wings’
Bryan Murphy is a dynamics and motion control engineer at Boeing, where he gets to create digital physics models of robotic space mechanisms to predict their performance.
His favorite projects include the ISS treadmill vibration isolation system and the shiny new docking system. He grew up on a small farm where his hands-on time with mechanical devices fueled his interest in engineering.
When not at work, he loves to brainstorm and create with his artist/engineer wife and their nerdy kids, or go on long family roadtrips—- especially to hike and kayak or eat ice cream. He’s also vice president of a local makerspace, where he leads STEM outreach and includes excess LEDs in all his builds.
Susan
Here’s Susan rocking some of those LED glasses and getting a good grip on ISS Mimic
Susan is a mechanical engineer and a 30+-year veteran of manned spaceflight operations. She has worked the Space Shuttle Program for Payloads (middeck experiments and payloads deployed with the shuttle arm) starting with STS-30 and was on the team that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope.
She then transitioned into life sciences experiments, which led to the NASA Mir Program where she was on continuous rotation for three years to Russian Mission Control, supporting the NASA astronaut and science experiments onboard the space station as a predecessor to the ISS.
She currently works on the ISS Program (for over 20 years now), where she used to write procedures for on-orbit assembly of the Space Xtation and now writes installation procedures for on-orbit modifications like the docking adapter. She is also an artist and makes crosses out of found objects, and even used to play professional women’s football.
High-school student Eleanor Sigrest successfully crowdfunded her way onto a zero-G flight to test her latest Raspberry Pi-powered project. NASA Goddard engineers peer reviewed Eleanor’s experimental design, which detects unwanted movement (or ‘slosh’) in spacecraft fluid tanks.
The Raspberry Pi-packed setup
The apparatus features an accelerometer to precisely determine the moment of zero gravity, along with 13 Raspberry Pis and 12 Raspberry Pi cameras to capture the slosh movement.
What’s wrong with slosh?
The Broadcom Foundation shared a pretty interesting minute-by-minute report on Eleanor’s first hyperbolic flight and how she got everything working. But, in a nutshell…
The full apparatus onboard the zero gravity flight
You don’t want the fluid in your space shuttle tanks sloshing around too much. It’s a mission-ending problem. Slosh occurs on take-off and also in microgravity during manoeuvres, so Eleanor devised this novel approach to managing it in place of the costly, heavy subsystems currently used on board space craft.
Eleanor wanted to prove that the fluid inside tanks treated with superhydrophobic and superhydrophilic coatings settled quicker than in uncoated tanks. And she was right: settling times were reduced by 73% in some cases.
At just 13 years old, Eleanor won the Samueli Prize at the 2016 Broadcom MASTERS for her mastery of STEM principles and team leadership during a rigorous week-long competition. High praise came from Paula Golden, President of Broadcom Foundation, who said: “Eleanor is the epitome of a young woman scientist and engineer. She combines insatiable curiosity with courage: two traits that are essential for a leader in these fields.”
Eleanor aged 13 with her award-winning project ‘Rockets & Nozzles & Thrust… Oh My’
That week-long experience also included a Raspberry Pi Challenge, and Eleanor explained: “During the Raspberry Pi Challenge, I learned that sometimes the simplest solutions are the best. I also learned it’s important to try everyone’s ideas because you never know which one might work the best. Sometimes it’s a compromise of different ideas, or a compromise between complicated and simple. The most important thing is to consider them all.”
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