After the success of the Drone and Apple //e projects I was going through the storage closets and found a truck body. I asked my engineering teacher what it was for and he had told me it was for a truck that was broken and needed to be fixed. I asked if I could fix it and he agreed. We decided the truck would be good for advertising our engineering and robotics sponsors at events and show what you can do when you join. Upon looking at the truck there were many problems, electronics were fried, and nothing worked, the frame was damaged, the truck needed a complete rebuild. So I started from the ground up and made a new truck. I had to keep a few things the same like the motor mounts, since we did not have any aluminum I could use, since all the new aluminum was for the Robotics Team and I could get what was left over. I made sure the truck was secure and once the frame was sturdy and ready for driving I began on the electronics. 

The electronics on this project was very simple and easy. I used my arduino experience from the Drone project to program a new Arduino. The purpose of this arduino, was to convert the Analog Potentiometer signal, and convert it to PWM which was sent to the new REV Robotics Spark Motor Drivers. I also upgraded the battery, It was originally only one small 12v battery, I created a connector that wired two 12V batteries in series, doubling the battery capacity.

When I tested the truck we had an issue, the PWM code I had written was sending a reverse signal for the first half of the twist throttle, then on the second half was forward signal, so when you slowly twisted the throttle you began in reverse, then as you twisted the throttle more reverse got faster until it switched to forward and started slow and got faster. This was not ideal as we wanted to be able to safely drive the truck, so we decided to not have a reverse gear for the time being, and only program a forward motion on the PWM signal, and everything was functional!

The truck remained in its current state for a while, unable to be put in reverse and what not, and I wanted to change it. Another problem was the motor mounts we could not change, would fall due to the weight of the 1000w motor. This caused the chain to become loose, and eventually fall off which was a huge pain to put back on. We did add under-glow lighting using an LED strip to the bottom of the truck, and coded a Lanier Orange to match the truck.

In February 2020 I began to fix all the major issues and install a reverse gear. Due to COVID-19, the engineering program was closed temporarily due to the pandemic, and did not open again until after I graduated. I never got to fix the issues with it.