We have finished up the BBRover, BBCopter and BBPlane. I also created a YouTube channel for BoxBotix. Hope to go live with small Kickstarter next weekend. Yes, yet another drone Kickstarter.
There are plenty of pics/videos of stuff flying so thought we would see how the BBRover does off-road. And it actually surprised me a bit. Does pretty well with the 12in "Big Wheel" mod for not having suspension. We have decide to start with a bit smaller wheels (8in diameter) for the first kits as the little planetary gear motors don't like the big wheels and really hard abuse. The warning about stalling a gear motor and causing gear damage is no lie. Still think we have a good Rover design to start for indoor/outdoor use. We will plan to go full on Monster Truck with larger gear motors a bit down the road. Then need to figure out best way to integrate payload and sensors. But that is why we will open source it all. Hope to start dropping initial files this week.
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Comments
Thanks! Your Mango FPGA looks very interesting as well.
I really like the BoxBotix concept! Looking forward to supporting your campaign!
Hey Dave. I do like the smaller planetary motors for general use. They do great until you wedge a wheel and stall a motor trying to do stupid robot tricks. I think one of our Stretch Goals for the Kickstarter may be a basic BBMonsterTruck. Likely not going to have time/money to get it to run either side up, as that is going to require a couple GPS and some code to support switching directions etc, but I think we can integrate the bigger motors and tires if there is enough interest.
And we have decided on Dec 1st for our Kickstarter Launch.
Thanks Chris! We are running the smaller precision planetary gear motors from ServoCity. Slow and pretty high torque. I have 2 x 5000 3S lipo's in the rover for the tests in the video. So about 5 pounds of rover. No problems with grass/weeds but as you noted it takes some power. I think our plan for the BBMonsterTruck version will be to have the Big Wheel mod and set it up to run either side up. My personal goal is to see the rover climb steps like they are not there. And I really want a 3D camera rig with HD video in the nose.
EPP has proven to be a good wheel choice for basic needs but I think we eventually need to go to a larger diameter 3D printed wheel with 3D printed TPE treads to get the traction we need. But this skid steer rover thing is pretty new to us as well. Much different than the RC cars/trucks we bomb around, so we still have much learning. And that does make it fun.
Love this! The big challenge with offroad rovers is deep grass and weeds, which can stop them even faster than rocks. There's really nothing better than sheer size and ground-clearance for that, but 4WD and very big wheels do help.