Ballbot – assembled parts

I've been doing a lot of work since last time and there have been some changes in the design as well!

After I assembled a couple of parts in FreeCAD I realized that I had miscalculated (in my head) the size of some of them 🙁
I had to flip the base plate upside down to make room for the steering cradle and remove the friction wheels, because they wouldn't fit anymore. I also had to make the propel wheel larger to get better grip and to make the ball go a bit faster.
The approximate speed is now somewhere about 10 km/h, which is a quite good speed I think.

Screenshot from 2014-02-25 11:52:48

The base plate front view - with motors and steering craddle and its servo

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Ballbot skeleton – Testprint

A couple of days ago I got a mail with an attached film clip of the first printed piece of the skeleton.

The day after, "Dubbear" came to my place and I got it in my own hands so that I could look, bend, squeeze and feel the first printed part of my very first CAD-project!
We took a look at my CAD-files and "Dubbear" showed me that my parts wasn't made as solids. I had simply misunderstood how to build the parts in a correct way!
Later on I did some googling and it turned out that it wouldn't be as much work as I feared to fix the parts into solids.

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Ballbot skeleton

It's been quite some time since I last wrote something here, before the last post that is 🙂 so it's about time I do so!

It all started when I saw a post on Instructables about a Remote controlled basket ball robot. I immediately started to plan how I could make my own - who doesn't want a remote controlled ballbot!

Since I've got a lot of R/C parts laying around I figured it wouldn't be too expensive to gather the rest of the electronics needed, a DC motor and an ESC.
In the instructable the author used a 7" (17.8cm) hamster ball as the housing for his ballbot. 7" is quite small if you want to fit sensors and other fun stuff into the ball and really make it into a robot, not just a radio controlled ball. Continue reading