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Rotacaster Holonomic Wheels

This morning the mailman had another package for me!  It was a padded envelope with nothing less than the 4 Technic axle compatible holonomic wheel prototypes from Rotacaster

I haven’t had a chance to build anything with them but my first impressions are:

  • Very compact, they’re about 3.5 units wide and about 6 units in diameter;
  • Quiet!  They’re all plastic, that means no noisy metal frames to hold the sub wheels;
  • Smooth ride, they’re very round;
  • Slightly bigger than the NXT 2.0 wheel and slightly smaller than the 1.0 wheel, so no motor clearance issues.

The white hub inserts are prototyped and still need a little fine tuning; some of the pieces hold the axle a little too tightly, requiring a firm hold to push the axles through.  The inserts stay in place in the wheel using a very small key that fits into a narrow gap.  I am sure you don’t really care about all this, you just want to see what they look like, so without further ado:

Size comparison of NXT 1.0, Rotacaster, NXT 2.0 wheels Rotacaster wheel attached to NXT motor
Top view of Rotacaster wheel attached to NXT motor Rotacaster with white hub inserts. Wheels are very compact.

I will try to put together a nice prototype robot with these this weekend.  I have 4 of them so I should be able to build some pretty cool models with this.  More pictures and a video will follow.

Thanks, Peter!

About Xander

Xander Soldaat is a Software Engineer and former Infrastructure Architect. He loves building and programming robots. He recently had the opportunity to turn his robotics hobby into his profession and has started working for Robomatter, the makers of ROBOTC and Robot Virtual Words.