Are you in china, cause its 12:57 AM here 
Uh, no, it was 12:57am where I live too. Apparently PHBBS is displaying time at itās location on the messages. Anyway, Iāll find the invoices from what I bought and link the parts later today around lunch.
Thanks Eddie, Appreciate it!
looks like it all came from tower.
wheels
axles
wheel collars
I cut thin aluminum with my table saw (carbide blade) + band saw + mitre box (also carbide blade), have a drill press to make holes (but am never happy with the results), and also use my dremel tool to clean edges up as needed. whatever you do make certain youāve got full eye protection on because you would be amazed where the little chips can get to and itās not like getting sawdust in your eyes when working wood. 
Absolutely! Full eye protection is neccessary. 8)
alright, bassically to cut the aluminum I will use a carbide blade on my circular saw, a drill press, and a grinder. Hopefully I will get a dremel soon for the other small stuff.
For those wheels, Im guessing you drilled a hole in the chassis, attached the axles to the wheels and screwed them into the chassis?
um, well actually I assembled the axles to the side plates first. I didnāt actually put the road wheels on until I was just about to hook the track sections together. there are wheels collars on both the plate side and the axle end to space the wheels so they properly align with the track.
You need a table saw for any sort of accuracy with the non ferous metals blade. These blades have a negative tooth rake so you donāt hurt yourself. donāt use a regular carbide blade it will dig in and send the piece flying. 
Minor progress here in that I downloaded and installed the Visual C++ Express 2005, Platform SDK, and Direct-X SDK packages from MS. It took a little bit of reading/configuring but I got the dx joystick sample app to compile, link, and run. So Iāll probably use that as a starting point and add serial communications to it so I can send commands to my SSC-32. With any luck in the next couple weeks (time permitting) I should be able to get a test system up and running with a matchboard linking my PC to the ROV. Sort of bypassing its onboard mini-itx atm just because I donāt feel like dealing witht he complexity but at the same time want to play with the chassis. 
ok so I gave up on my ms lifecam as a camera due to the lag issues pretty much preventing any sort of real-time feedback and ordered a PC33CHR-4G High Res Color Surveillance Camera and this lens CML12-30SGVA - 12-30mm Varifocal Auto Iris from supercircuits. The camera is 0.01lux and with the auto-iris I think it should be able to go from full daylight to LED spotlight pretty easily. I am going to see if I can also rig a way to move the zoom lever with a micro servo so weāll see how that works out. If I can get that to work then at about 1 foot away I figure I can get down to around a 2" square area for inspection. should be interesting to play with anyway.
I would suspect the video lag problem has to do with the software being used and not necessarily with the cam itself. Most recent USB cams are supplied with the generic MS WDM drivers. Yoy may want to check the USB cam with something simple like vidcap32.exe to see if the same problem is present.
You might be a bit to late since Eddie said he already ordered his new cam.
yeah thatās true enough, but also I have been sort of playing around with different applications and the lifecam camera and it seems there is some kind of buffering in the stream. that buffering might well be in the drivers but I would not know what to replace them with anyway so they might as well be considered part of the camera. anyway, in addition to that I was not able to get even 15 fps at more than 320x200 res so the two things combined I just said screw it. Iāve got both a USB based capture port and if that doesnāt work well enough Iāve got a PCI based capture card I can use. last resort is Iāve got a xcam2 system I can hack the camera off of (as per the rc-cam website illustrates) and use that as a wireless rf link back to my desktop where by god I KNOW itāll do 30fps at 640x480. 
This may often be the case with inexpensive hardware. Remember the āWindows Modemsā of several years back? They depended on the windows drivers to provide a lot of the modem functionality to keep the cost of the products down. Of course, this meant you could not (or at least not easily) use those modems with any other operating system without dupicating the modem driver functionality.
Beware of hardware designed to be used with Windows that has a seemingly too good to be true low price. Itās probably for a reasonā¦
8-Dale
sort of a minor looking update but Iāve got the hard disk, abb, batteries for sabertooth and abb, and switches mounted up. the camera arm/boom and front sensor panel are removed while I was working on it. mini-itx mounts are all there but Iām still working on mouting itās battery (which also powers the camera through the capture card) so itāll be another weekend or two before I get that all figured out and done. Still, considering this is running in parallel with 3 other projects, it is making gradual progressā¦ at least the wife is impressed enough so far to let me keep buying robot toys. heh heh heh. of course the toy we were looking at last weekend had an 1100cc liquid cooled motor butā¦ well thatās another story. 
farm4.static.flickr.com/3364/3547310602_764816bd86.jpg
farm4.static.flickr.com/3345/3546503203_7b1639f9c8.jpg
EB
:mrgreen:
wow, looks good, i cant wait to see that thing run
i have something to say thoughā¦I CHALLENGE UR ROVER TO A DUEL! , i need to get mine looking as neat as yoursā¦ 
, time to go do some wiring
again, looks good and i want to see it running by the end of tonight hits desk for emphasis
heh, I think your versions have a wee bit more horsey power than my toy here. we shall see what happens with my revision 2.
Very nice work EddieB! I am planning on a nano-ITX rover for the future. If you donāt mind me asking, how will you power your micro-ITX board? Iām guessing a battery since you mentioned battery What specs? Voltage, amperages, and mAh?
Love the rover 
Very clean looking, sexy tracks and frame.
Cheers,
-robodude666
its nonsesnse, i dont see where you got that notion 
mines like the huge jock and urs the small nerd oh well, brains over brawn right?
ah well, its looking goo, btw, wat are those lpa joints gonna be for on the left side of the 2nd picture? hmmm??
Ps. Iām guessing street bike or jetski (betting more on jetski)
LPA are used on the camera pan/tilt/boom. If you scroll back a couple pages youāll see a close up pic or two of that assembly.
going to use a dr-202 type li-ion smart batttery for the motherboard. hopefully the smbus on the board will interface directly to the battery. I also have a linear tech dc512 smart charger eval board so Iām going to see if I can use that as well. I have not tried connecting the smbus header on the motherboard to the battery/charger yet so we shall see what happens. fwiw, I have a couple of these batteries left over from a work project sitting in a junk pile so itās pretty easy to test out. Iāve got one of the wide input 60W pico-PSU modules to take the battery voltage and generate all the ATX input voltages. The packs I have are 10.8/11.4V so those are what Iāll try first. If the SMBUS interface works as expected and I need more capacity itās pretty easy to just shift to a 14.4V pack with that dc-dc. nice thing is the camera will work off of either pack voltage as well. Thing is most cheap laptop packs are only designed to output about 30-40W (i.e. around 3-3.5 amperes) so I need to be careful how much stuff I try to run off of it. There are high output types but Iām looking for a $65 solution not a $165 one. Will see what happens and post results eventually. 8)
Ahhh alright. I am going to get a PicoPSU that has a wide voltage from like 12v to 24v. And get a 14.8v, 4-6A li-ion. But how I will recharge it is another question. A laptop battery would work for a micro or nano-ITX board, right? I seen a few rechargable external laptop batteries that plug into the DC plug on the back. That might work, right?