Vehicle design. Three wheels powered by stepper motors gives the vehicle the ability to travel and to steer in desired direction (limited but ability). However, positioning an antenna to the Earth direction will require something more than a stepper motor’s steps with 1.8 degree precisions. Obvious way to do this is to use some ceramic gearbox (one at least). An attempt was made to understand how to build such a gearbox. Was investigated way to manufacture cast for planet and sun gear in Epicyclic gear type (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicyclic_gearing). Such gear’s type was chosen to make it as small as possible and as a result to achieve light weight. For a cast manufacturing it is handy to use a 3D printers (http://www.makerbot.com/ , http://www.botmill.com/ , http://www.pp3dp.com/ , or a more easy way - to make 3D model design in .stl format, upload it to personal factory like http://www.ponoko.com/ , and build plastic cast with precision 0.2 mm (the same technique can be used to create a cast for any carbon fiber elements of a probe/vehicle). Castable ceramic like 672, 510, 646, 589 can be used.
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