OSR RocksBack in January of this year I joined a team of pre-release beta testers for a project out of nearby Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). While not exactly a state secret, we were asked not to overtly broadcast or advertise the project until after JPL's own publicity office started doing so. This publicity release happened two days ago so the JPL Open Source Rover is now officially public.

https://twitter.com/NASAJPL/status/1024370356738437125

Our team members drew from SGVHAK, so we've been calling our rover SGVHAK rover instead of JPL open source rover. Past blog entries talking about SGVHAK's customization were described as done in contrast to a vague undefined "baseline rover." I've gone back and edited those references (well, at least the ones I could find) to point to JPL's rover web site. Which had gone live a few weeks ago but that was a "soft opening" until JPL's publicity office made everything officially public.

After SGVHAK team completed the rover beta build in March, I went off on my own to build Sawppy the Rover as a much more affordable alternative to a rover model. To hit that $500 price point, I had described the changes and trade-offs against SGVHAK rover but it was really against JPL's open source rover. I've fixed up these old blog posts minimally - the references are now correct though some of the sentence structures got a little awkward.

As part of JPL's open source rover project, they had established a public web forum where people can post information about their builds. To share our story I've gone ahead and created a forum thread for SGVHAK rover, and a separate one for Sawppy.

I look forward to seeing what other people will build.