What is Curiosity?

Curiosity is a car-sized rover designed to explore Gale Crater on Mars as part of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission (MSL).Curiosity was launched from Cape Canaveral on November 26, 2011, at 15:02 UTC.

How it works?

Curiosity has many sensors which detect temperature and detect various environment conditions and send this data back to Earth.So i made this small model of Curiosity which detects many environment condition and send this data to cloud .

What will it detect ?

it can detect :

1.Temperature.

2.Humidity.

3. Methane.

4. Carbon-dioxide.

5. Carbon Mono-oxide.

6. Soil Humidity.

So lets get Started!!

Step 1: Hardware Required:

1. 3-Arduino (uno or nano).

2. 2-Zigbee.

3. 6-DC Motor.

4. 4 Relays.

5. MQ-2 Sensor.

6. MQ-5 Sensor.

7. MQ-7 Sensor.

8. DHT-11(Temperature and humidity sensor).

9. 2-Servo Motors.

10. 12-volt UPS battery.

11. 8-Push button.

12. 9 Volt battery and clip.

13. ESP 8266-01

14. AM1117 3.3 voltage regulator.

15. 7805 voltage regulator.

16. Rectangular Aluminium Rod.

17. Wooden piece.

18. Card-board or Sun-board.

19. Resistor,capacitor & PCB.

Step 2: Software Requirement:

1. Arduino IDE . if you don't have you can download here:

https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software.

2. XCTU for Zigbee pairing. you can download here:

https://www.digi.com/products/xbee-rf-solutions/xctu-software/xctu

3 ESP8266 firmware and uploader.

4. Thing Speak login.

5. DHT-11 Library.

Step 3: Making Rover:

it uses arduino which accept data form zig-bee and controlling the motors according to it .

Left three and right three motors are connected in parallel.So when one side of motors turn clockwise and others turn anti-clock wise it produce drift which turns rover.

I use 60 RPM motor which has high torque.so It can-not be controlled by simple motor driver like L293D because it run 6 motors in parallel , so i use relay as shown in figure.

Two servo motors are used to control arm because these are servo motor so it is connected to PWM pins of arduino.

Body is made from any light material such as card-board or sun-board. I use heavy wooden piece on bottom because it carry battery and other material.

Step 4: Making Arm and Its Sensors:

I made arm from rectangular pipe because it is light weight and easy to cut and mold. all the wires of all sensors are passed through this pipe.

Here i use two servo motors one in center.All the sensors are connected to arduino which is further connected to ESP 8266-01 Wi-Fi module .AM117 3.3 volt is used to provide proper voltage to ESP.

Note: Gas sensors have heating coil so it takes large current which result in overheating and sometimes damages the voltage regulator. So i proffer to use separate voltage regulator to sensor for proving 5 Volt and don't forget to attach heat-sink to it.

All analog sensor are connected to analog pins of arduino as shown:

Step 5: Making Remote Control

Remote contain contain zig-bee for its wireless communication.

Why Zig-bee: Zig-bee or Xbee provide very high secure communication than wi-fi or Bluetooth. It also provide large coverage area and low power consumption. At very large distances zig-bee can connected to hopping mode so these can work as a repeater.

Eight switched are connected to arduino with pull up resistor.

Four left button control arm and four right buttons control movement of rover.

Zigbee require 3.3 volt power supply so it is connected to 3.3 volt pin of arduino.