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 πŸ™
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 πŸ™‚ 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

16 LED Scanner Project

It's been a while since I wrote last time so I thought I'd better put something up!

Eye of the Cambot 3000

This was my small contribution to GoKinema this year...

...a Cylon scanner to this ΓΌber cool robo statue - Cambot 3000.

Anders at Gothenburg Prop Makers made the fantastic robot and I helped him to give it "life"!
The bot is made from old film lamps, lenses, tripods, and old camcorders, it stood in the entry hall at Gothenburg Film Studios during GoKinema. Continue reading