Making the Frame
When first making my Marsquake sensor, I needed something to hold it all together. I chose to make a wireframe to accomplish this task. The frame itself was relatively easy to construct with super glue and tape holding most of the joints together. The most difficult part of this stage proved to be keeping my hands clean of the super glue.
Adding the Arduino
Adding all the components for the sensor proved to be a fair bit more challenging. Figuring out ways to keep the motor in place was hard in particular, as the hatch that it needed to open was a fair bit larger than the motor was capable of. Along with this, affixing the motor to the frame took a fair bit of work as it needed to counter the force used to lift up the hatch.
Decoration In Progress
When it came to hiding the components, I drew inspiration from the Viking project. This was a mission from NASA to try and detect the presence of “Earthquakes” on mars. Using this as my reference I wanted to create something similar in design. Unfortunately due to time constraints the sensor is not as aesthetically pleasing as I would have liked, but it fulfills it’s purpose.
Getting All the Code to Work
The code took some time to get working. Trying to make all the components work simultaneously proved to be quite the challenge. Ultimately, I had to slowly build the code and test as I went along to figure out what was causing the issues I experienced. The end result was fairly reliable code that behaved like it should for the most part.
Leave a Reply