Monday 22 June 2020

Hackspace Magazine Issue 32, Opensource MTV robot!


Normally when each months Hackspace Magazine comes out I update this "keeping track of my articles" post, do a few tweets and move on. This months magazine has a project I put together that feels worthy of a little blog post all of its own though! I was asked to write a tutorial using a cheap tracked robot chassis kit (just the wheels, chassis, motors and tracks around £20-25 online) on how to build a budget robot. I decided to go a bit further than just cutting a couple of boards to mount stuff to and came up with an entire modular system built up on the cheap chassis from 3d printed parts. Whilst this particular robot is referred to in our house as "red one" the whole modular robot project is called "MTV" short for Modular Tracked Vehicle. All the modules feature M4 holes on 10mm centres so that modules can be mounted in lots of places and it can all be reconfigurable perfect for adding experiments and other doohickies too! I did all the 3d work in FreeCAD so that it is made with opensource and free tools and also all the files are published in a project repo on gitlab. I'm not going to give you the link though, you have to go download the (excellent imho) magazine, read the articles and find the link there! Check out hackspace issue 32 here.  I'd love to see others tinkering on this so do feel free to join in, merge requests are open on the repository and do get in touch if you build one!

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