It’s Working!!!!

Yesterday was a very busy day but late last night I gave the mountain wheelchair it’s first test-drive and it climbed up my sofa with complete ease:

Keep in mind that it currently doesn’t have any brakes for the descent, but that’s proof of concept right there!

It’s also drives over car batteries and those boxes containing 5 packs of a A4 printer paper, also with incredible ease, hence putting a sofa in front of it. The rocky path up Snowdon should be a doddle :)

Large rocky steps (otherwise known as Granny Stoppers) on the Llanberis Path

The final rocky path towards the summit

As was to be expected though, not everything worked perfectly; it is incredibly difficult, in fact, it’s virtually impossible, to get the thing to steer. It could in part be due to a problem with one of the motor controllers (One of back motors is currently inoperable). Hopefully I can get that fixed today and then see what happens. It could also be due to a problem with the rocker bogie mechanism but I have implemented a solution to this in the smaller prototypes. Hopefully the same solution can be applied here. Failing that, I’m going to have to completely rethink the steering mechanism.

So on the downside, the steering is a big problem that could potentially take much time, effort and money to resolve (although it could also be a quick fix), but on the plus side, the wheelchair looks completely capable of getting up those rocky steps so often encountered in the mountains.