Please don’t mind the mess (Omniwheel part II)

I love days when I really feel like building something, you know that inspired feeling you get?  Today I started building at about 9am and didn’t come out of my Lego room all day except for dinner and lunch.

I took some pictures of the unholy mess my desk was covered with. The first picture was taken after about an hour’s building (the desk started off completely tidy) and the second is the state of it now.  I cleaned up a little, most of the stuff there are all small parts and I can’t be bothered to sort them all and put them back.  I’ll do that tomorrow. 

I’ve been working on various models of omniwheeled robots for a while now, refining the design with each step.  Last week I had rebuilt it completely, giving it 4 wheels instead of 3.  It was nice but not what I wanted.  The picture on the left is what it looked like before I changed it to a 4 wheeled monster.  The one on the right is the 4 wheeled giant.  It weighed a massive 2200 grams and had real trouble moving. Like its predecessors, it was still trying to move too fast.  More gearing down was required.

So it was time for some drastic changes.  I ripped the whole thing apart for the Nth time (I believe this is probably rebuild number 30 or so).  The new model is really low and has a nice area in the center which houses the brick. There are currently only two sensors (Dist-NX and NXTCamV3) connected to it as I have a special purpose in mind for this omniwheel.  More on that will follow soon.

So there you have it, prototype nr. 30.  I am sure it’s not the last rebuild.  Now it’s time to program this sucker to do my bidding.