Collaborate Disseminate
Rollerskates are all well and good, but they’re even more fun when they’re powered. Then again, why stick with wheels, when you can have the off-road benefits of tracked propulsion? …read more Continue reading Tank Boots Are A Dangerous Way To Get Around Town
One of the few positives to come of this pandemic is that the restrictive nature of scarcity can be a boon to creativity. Plus, the doom and gloom of it all is causing people to loosen up and do things they never felt free enough to do before in the …read more
Continue reading Remotely Navigate the Apocalypse in Mid-Century Style
Part of [Gelstronic]’s house has a glass roof. While he enjoys the natural light and warmth, he doesn’t like getting up on a ladder to clean it every time a bird makes a deposit or the rainwater stains build up. He’s tried to make a cleaning robot in the past, but the 25% slope of the roof complicates things a bit. Now, with the addition of stepper motors and grippy tank treads, [Gelstronic] can tell this version of GRawler exactly how far to go, or to stay in one place to clean a spot that’s extra dirty.
GRawler is designed …read more
[Ivan] has been keeping his 3D printers busy with parts he’s experimenting with to build a tracked motion setup for a tank-like vehicle. His design uses several interlocking parts, so if you want to duplicate it, we hope your printer calibration is up to snuff. He’s still printing more parts and promises to release the files once the design proves out.
However, you can see he’s off to a good start. Small pieces fit together and accept a piece of filament as a sort of hinge. Some pins keep the filament from working out. Pads fit into the main parts …read more
[Dickel] always liked tracked vehicles. Taking inspiration from the ‘Peacemaker’ tracked vehicle in Mad Max: Fury Road, he replicated it as the Mad Mech. The vehicle is remote-controlled and the tank treads are partly from a VEX robotics tank tread kit. Control is via a DIY wireless controller using an Arduino and NRF24L01 modules. The vehicle itself uses an Arduino UNO with an L298N motor driver. Power is from three Li-Po cells.
The real artistic work is in the body. [Dickel] used a papercraft tool called Pepakura (non-free software, but this Blender plugin is an alternative free approach) …read more
Continue reading Glorious Body of Tracked ‘Mad Mech’ Started as Cardboard
Don’t let the knee-high size of [Hrastovc]’s creation fool you. TrackRobot weighs in at a monstrous 60 kg (130 lbs) of steel, motors, and battery. It sports two 48V motors in a body and frame made from pieces of finger-jointed sheet steel, and can reach speeds of up to four meters per second with a runtime of up to an hour. The project’s link has more pictures as well as DXF files of the pieces used for the body.
Currently TrackRobot is remote-controlled, but one goal is to turn it into a semi-autonomous snow plow. You can see TrackRobot going …read more
Continue reading TrackRobot Sports Welded Steel, Not Plastic
When it comes to robotic platforms, there is one constant problem: wheels. Wheels have infinite variety for every purpose imaginable, but if you buy a wheeled robotic chassis you have exactly one choice. Even if you go down to the local Horror Freight, there’s only about five or six different wheels available, all of which will quickly disintegrate.
To solve this problem, [Audrey] created OpenWheel, a system of parametric, 3D-printable wheels, tweels, tires, and tracks for robotics and more.
Like all good parametric 3D-printable designs, OpenWheel is written in OpenSCAD. These aren’t 3D designs; they’re code that compiles into printable …read more
