Up until this point, all the equipment inside Sawppy the Rover's equipment bay has been installed onto the bay's aluminum extrusion beams in an ad-hoc fashion. Sometimes they were zip-tied onto a beam, sometimes taped, and sometimes they sat on a small 3D-printed shelf. None of them were very robust and they all shared the problem they can be damaged by obstacles Sawppy is trying to climb over.

They were just temporary placeholder solutions until we could get access to a laser cutter to create a sheet of acrylic to serve as the bottom of Sawppy's equipment bay. One was drawn up to match equipment bay dimensions in CAD and the file waited until laser cutter access was available.

Box bottom pre installation

Since the acrylic sheet's dimensions came from CAD and not the actual box that has been built, it's no surprise its installation exposed some assembly errors. This is a tale as old as engineering, made better (or worse) by CAD software. It fits in CAD!

Aside from overall dimension errors, there was also a problem caused by overlooking the room taken up by our M3 nut installation tool. Installation tool for panel wants to occupy the same physical space as installation tool for body corner. This doesn't work very well in the real world. The real fix is to move fastener holes on the acrylic sheet. For now our workaround is to offset insertion tool and use only one of the M3 nuts.

Box bottom insert conflict

This first attempt fits well enough to proceed with Sawppy construction. Now we have a bottom panel to the equipment bay and components now have something nice to sit on.

But we have one final problem for today: laser cutting a sheet of clear acrylic means it is very hard to photograph. This picture tries to draw attention to the clear sheet with a hex wrench placed on top of the sheet. The hex wrench is not floating in mid-air!

Box bottom installed