Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Like the Rover, the robot arm of the Lander module is also made of materials stored in my cellar.
The robot arm has three joints, making it possible to rotate the camera around three axes.
The camera arm is approximately 45cm long and the length from the pivot point to the camera is roughly speaking 30cm.
The pivot point of the arm is 45 cm above the base plate.
One servo turns the camera directly around the vertical axis.
With the help of the second servo, the robot arm can be actuated vertically, too.
Hence the camera can be lifted for approximately 60cm.
The robot arm is actuated by a winch which is turned by a servo.
The third servo turns the whole robot arm around it's horizontal axis.
The potentiometer, acting as rotational sensor, is mounted beneath the base plate.
The illumination is done by 19 white LEDs which can be dimmed by pulse-width modulation.
The infra red interface at the front of the base plate is used to send the identification code of the lander and to receive commands from the rover.
Those commands control the display of a laptop, equipped with a 333MHz CPU and 256MB of RAM, serving as the Lander's hostcomputer.
The Linux distribution Knoppix in version 6.2 is running as operating system.
The connection between Laptop and robot arm is done by the USB interface and a microcontroller of the atmel company, which also processes the signals for the servos and the transistor of the beam light.
That's all about the construction details of the robot arm - by for now!