ive been wrapped up with my WPL C24-1 this past week or two building and painting, designing and printing a different gearbox mount, lift parts for the body, remixing a track bar setup to fix the loose front end so the steering works good, designing a front bumper with a built in winch.
Real happy with how its turned out, here is a pic from when i first got it painted:
And this after adding headlight, rusting up the rims and fitting the bumper winch:
Ive since reprinted the bumper in resin instead of FDM and painted it but i havnt taken a pic of that.
So onto the main topic: Ive poked more at the cab for and have it to where im fixing to start printing the it around midnight, supposedly the vat on my Mars 2 should hold 250ml, the print is 200.6ml so it should have a good margin but i still want to check towards the end, ill set my alarm for eight hours after starting as the calculated print time is 9.15, they usually take a bit longer than the slicer calculation tho.
There are just a couple of mms to spare around the model itself but part of the raft is going to be left out, that hasnt been an issue before as ive filled the plate in previous prints but not so close to the full volume in every direction.
I also had a play around with one of the tank esc i have, they have two modes, allowing it to do on board mixing or work as two separate ESCs.
Onboard mixing is the easy, but not optimal, way to go. That mode makes it so that when one gives steering input it counter rotates the motors, without taking throttle into account, essentially making the "tank" turn in place.
Giving throttle and turning seems to lessen throttle to one tread tho so it might be alright if one just doesnt steer when not moving.
That way works with just two channels and no need for mixing on the radio, simply split channel 1 out into both the tank ESC and and steering servo, then hook channel 2 into the other input on the tank ESC and it will work in this limited way but no programming needed.
The better way would be to run it in two ESC mode and use a radio that does mixing.
Channel 1 to the steering servo and have throttle put out on other channels, both inversely affected by steering input, so no input would allow for full throttle range and one would need to figure out what is a steering to throttle output to set that in the mix to make a nice turn.
A half track might actually have been possible to pivot on slick surfaces by locking one track brake and having the wheels sliding sideways but that isnt the goal for this vehicle.
Im gonna start working on the new dual motor mount soon enough as its going to be needed regardless of which way i eventually go with controlling them.
