Week 8: Suffering From Success

The car is moving under its own power, and the first real driving tests this week went better than expected. The chassis rolls smoothly, the steering is responsive, and overall the vehicle handles well across both surface types. However, this early success has introduced an unexpected concern: the 28-turn (number of turns refers to how many times the copper wire is wrapped around each pole of the motor’s armature or stator) brushed motor is generating significantly more power and speed than anticipated, even with the current high gear ratio. While a fast and capable vehicle is satisfying to see, if the car is moving fast enough to effectively skip over surface irregularities rather than responding to them, the suspension may not be engaging meaningfully enough to produce measurable differences between the two geometry configurations. In other words, the vehicle may be performing too well for the bumps and terrain variations to show up clearly in the data.

Options on the table include adjusting the gearing to reduce top speed, running trials at controlled throttle levels, or revisiting the terrain setup to introduce more pronounced surface irregularities that the suspension cannot simply power through. I’m most likely not going to have time to change the design again. Regardless of how it gets resolved, data collection is on the horizon and will begin soon.