Inspiration
We're a group of freshmen, completely new to hackathons and frankly, any serious engineering as a whole. We walked into this hoping for the best, knowing that even if we couldn't quite match up in ability, we would make up for it in ingenuity and effort. One of the first thoughts many people have about space, other than it just being pretty cool, is about all of the risks that come with space travel and living. It's not exactly the most hospitable place for human life, and despite all of the failsafes already in place, it's impossible to prepare for any eventuality. Our idea was meant to help in the case of those eventualities, an ambulance adjacent rover that could get needed supplies to any crewmates away from their lunar inhabitants in the event of an emergency.
What it does
The design of the rover itself is fairly simple, it is essentially a delivery bot made to travel on the lunar surface. It consists of a fairly basic chassis and container, but the important part of the rover is its ability to navigate obstacles and chart a route to anyone in need of its emergency services.
How we built it
We began with a basic chassis kit, as well as a couple servos and a board from a mostly desolate mechanical arm kit. We had also planned to 3D print the container as well as get a few other critical components, but that is something that will be explained in the challenges section. A large portion of the time was spent figuring out the electronics (as said, VERY new to this), and another significant portion setting up the terrain navigation system for the rover using python and tkinter.
Challenges we ran into
You'll first notice that this is a significantly long section. That is because challenges made up the majority of our efforts towards the rover. To begin with, we didn't quite get everything we needed the first time around. While we had an Arduino Uno to begin with, we failed to get a motor driver and a few necessary wires, or even realize we were missing them, for quite some time. Though we eventually got one the next day, that cut into our time actually testing everything to see if it worked. Another issue we ran into was actually putting everything together. We didn't submit our CAD models for our container in time, and with our position in the queue, we wouldn't have been able to print them out at all. Knowing that, we turned to the next readily available resources, cardboard and tape. We also didn't get our batteries, so we instead salvaged ones from various electronic devices we had around our dorms to get enough to actually power our bot. We also had changed our design a few times and ended up being forced to use office supplies such as zip-ties, paper clips, and a pencil for a few key mechanical components. Despite all of that, the biggest challenge we faced was our inexperience, mostly with software and electronics. We eventually overcame this challenge some trial and error later, and finally ended up with a working rover.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Frankly, all of us are immensely proud of just being able to say we completed this hackathon. We walked into this with a lot of hope but low expectations, and we managed to make a functional project. The coding and electronics especially, were something we made significant progress in understanding. The video itself (while short) was also something we put quite a bit of effort into and we're proud of how it turned out.
What we learned
Set more alarms in the morning, most of our team overslept by a couple of hours. Really though, we learned that we should have done MUCH more preparation in advance of the hackathon, as much was planned the day before and during the event itself. We learned a lot of what not to do in a hackathon, as we made a ton of mistakes, but that's one of the best ways to learn what to do right, and I know all of us will do better for our next hackathon.
What's next for HERMES - Human Emergency Response & Medical Equipment System
Hermes itself is going to be disassembled to return borrowed parts and get back our own components, but the idea was something all of us resonated with. This is a concept that we would love to explore more in either a future hackathon or even just as a personal project for us, diving deeper into making a more feasible design as well as greatly improving the software we threw together.
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