I bought a new battery pack for the RC transmitter. The old one could only charge up about 50%. We also took X up to Tacoma where the engine and tranny will be mounted.

Problem: While controlling the steering by remote control the motor was too weak to even turn the wheels on smooth cement. I wasn't sure why this was. I knew that when the motor was connected directly to a different battery it could turn the wheels with enough power that I couldn't stop them from turning. I thought of two possibilities: either the battery couldn't provide enough power and I would need to buy another battery and run it in parallel, or the wires I was using weren't thick enough and they were giving too much resistance. I tested the second one by taking a couple trips to Home Depot to get connectors and wires. After rewiring the whole thing much neater and with the new wires the steering was much improved.

I'm home sick from school today. The gearbox and CVT came in the mail today and the power supplies came a couple days ago. The engine is supposed to come today. The sprocket I got was 5/8" bore instead of 3/4" so I ordered a new one. I also ordered a new cable for the GPS that has an adapter for both power and data. I'll probably sell the wrong sprocket and the old cable on eBay.

I bought two 80GB hard drives and some SDRAM for the MII Mini-ITX mainboards.

I bought two PW70-A DC-DC power supplies for the MII Mini-ITX mainboards. I almost got PW-70 power supplies (60 watts) but before ordering them I read that they could only power slimline optical drives and 2.5" hard drives, so I got the slightly more expensive 120 watt PW70-A power supplies.

We bought a new 13hp engine as well as a continuously variable transmission (CVT) and a forward/neutral/reverse gearbox. The software is 98% complete; all that's left to be done is write a few lines of code, install the engine/transmission and the computer, and finally train the neural networks!

I got the subminiature position transducers from one of our sponsors - SpaceAge Control. I've been working hard on the route planning software tool.

I drove to Tacoma and brought X back to Olympia. Chris is taking the case and mainboards with him to Seattle University and I'll be working from my house.