YouTuber Builds Onewheel With Tracks Instead And It’s Not Great

March 22, 2024 by Lewin Day 15 Comments

The one-wheel is a triumph of modern sensor and control technology. That made it possible to sense the acceleration and position of a platform with a single wheel, and to control that single wheel to keep the platform stable and level, even in motion. [RCLifeOn] has now taken that same concept and made it more hilarious by swapping out the wheel for a track.

The original idea was to build an electric snowboard, which worked just okay. Then, it morphed into a tank-based one-wheel instead. It’s a bit silly on the face of it, because a track is more stable than a wheel. That’s because instead of balancing on a small flattened spot of a tire, it’s got a wider, flatter footprint. But that means there’s no real need for balancing control as the track is statically stable.

The 3D-printed track assembly is driven by a powerful brushless motor via a gear drive for additional torque. Riding it is difficult on 48-volt power as it easily throws [RCLifeOn] off the board with its raw torque. At 24 volts, however, it was just barely ridable with some practice. But it was ultimately pretty terrible. It was either not moving at all, or jerking so hard that it was impossible to stay on the thing.

We’d like to see this concept tried again, perhaps with a rubber track and a more refined controller. Video after the break.

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GETMusic Uses Machine Learning To Generate Music, Understands Tracks

July 27, 2023 by Donald Papp 10 Comments

Music generation guided by machine learning can make great projects, but there’s not usually much apparent control over the results. The system makes what it makes, and it’s an achievement if the results are not obvious cacophony. But that’s all different with GETMusic which allows for a much more involved approach because it understands and is able to create music by tracks. Among other things, this means one can generate a basic rhythm and melody first, then add additional elements to those existing ones, leaving the previous elements unchanged.

GETMusic can make music from scratch, or guided from examples, and under the hood uses a diffusion-based approach similar to the method behind AI image generators like Stable Diffusion. We’ve previously covered how Stable Diffusion works, but instead of images the same basic principles are used to guide the model from random noise to useful tracks of music.

Just a few years ago we saw a neural network trained to generate Bach, and while it was capable of moments of brilliance, it didn’t produce uniformly-listenable output. GETMusic is on an entirely different level. The model and code are available online and there is a research paper to accompany it.

You can watch a video putting it through its paces just below the page break, and there are more videos on the project summary page.

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Rubber Tracked Bicycle Is Horribly Inefficient

June 29, 2023 by Lewin Day 31 Comments

Wheeled bikes are efficient machines, and most cycling speed and distance records are held by them. However, [The Q] has a taste for weirder creations that amuse perhaps more than they serve as viable transportation. His latest experiments revolve around tracked propulsion methods.

The build is a wheelless bike that relies on long thin tracks mounted to a mountain bike frame. The tracks carriers are fabricated using steel box section fitted with cogged rollers. The tracks themselves are made using a pair of bicycle chains joined with welded steel bars. They’re fitted with slices of rubber cut out of traditional bike tires for grip. The rear track is driven from the bike’s pedals, while the front is merely left to run freely.

By virtue of its wide, flat tracks, the bike actually stands up on its own. It’s capable of riding in a straight line at slow speed, albeit relatively noisily. Steering is limited by virtue of the flat tracks, which don’t operate well at an angle to the ground. Since the tracks only contact the ground at a point, too, the bike has very high ground pressure, which would make it likely to sink into anything less solid than asphalt.

The build is relatively similar to [The Q]’s previous efforts to build a supposedly square-wheeled bike. What we’d really love to see at this point is a tracked bicycle that actually made the best of the technology – by being both swift and capable of crossing soft, marshy terrain. Video after the break.

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One-Piece Tank Chassis Pushes Print-in-Place To New Heights

January 20, 2023 by Donald Papp 30 Comments

What’s better than 3D printing a tank chassis with working tracks? How about 3D printing the entire thing, moving parts and all, as a single piece? That’s [3D Honza]’s PiPBOT-1, and it’s the culmination of a whole lot of design work.

The design prints flat, then folds up into its final form.

[3D Honza] has been sharing progress pictures and videos on his Twitter account, and just recently released the first version of his design. Version 1.0 is just the mechanics, but he’s already at work on version 2.0 which includes the ability to attach servos to drive the treads. At this writing, the design is currently downloadable directly from his site and includes CAD files, which is great to see.

One part of the design we’d like to draw your attention to is the chunky hinge that doubles as a kind of axial structure making up the body. This allows the tank to print in an unfolded state with the treads and wheels flat on the print bed. After printing, the tank gets folded up a bit like a taco to attain its final form. It’s a clever layout that allows the unit to be printed according to a filament-based 3D printer’s strengths, printing as a single piece that transforms into a small tank chassis, complete with working treads, in a few seconds.

When it comes to vehicles and bots, whether to choose wheels or tracks is a serious question our own Lewin Day has explained thoroughly. And for those of you who choose tracks, this design is great for small devices but don’t forget it’s always possible to go bigger when it comes to 3D-printed tanks.

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Ride-on Tracked Vehicle Is A Stout Metal Build

January 13, 2022 by Lewin Day 17 Comments

When we think of tracked vehicles, we normally think of tanks, or perhaps heavy construction machinery. Meanwhile the average member of the public is left out of the fun. [Bob] of [Making Stuff] won’t be one of them, however, having put together a ride-on tracked vehicle for his own enjoyment.

The machine is welded together from plenty of steel, making it more than tough enough to soak up the punishment of off-road duty. The design features four suspended buggy wheels on either side running inside rubber tracks, with a cogged drive wheel at the front. Propulsion is thanks to a 440 cc DuroMax engine good for a full 18 horsepower and 26 ft-lbs of torque, driving the tracks through a differential mounted up front.

The design has one major issue at the moment. The heavy engine is mounted ahead of the front wheel inside the tracks, which means the vehicle wants to nosedive at the slightest provocation. Such an event would be highly uncomfortable for the rider, so mods are needed, either by scooching the engine back a little or pushing the wheels forward.

We look forward to seeing [Bob] fix the issues and get the machine driving soon. We’ve seen other tracked builds before, too – often on the smaller scale. Video after the break.

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This Little Minecraft Mine Cart Of Mine

January 10, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 8 Comments

[Joel] of Joel Creates loves trains and Minecraft. So what better way to combine them than to make a real-life electric mine cart and ride it around?

At first glance, it seems pretty straightforward. Four wheels, each with a flange, mounted to a box with a motor. In practice, it was a little more complex than that. Just finding a spot of track to even ride on is tricky. Most “abandoned” tracks that you might see around your city often aren’t all that abandoned. Luckily for [Joel], he remembered an amusement park in the area that he went to as a kid, which he remembered having a decent amount of track. Additionally, the rails were smaller and closer to the scale of a real Minecraft track where one block is 1 meter. After calling up the owner and receiving permission, Joel began to build his cart.

First attempts to procure actual train wheels were foiled by cost and lead times, and simply CNCing a set of wheels was too expensive from a time and materials point of view. [Joel]’s first thought was about making an assembly out of two wheels to grip the rail, much like a roller coaster. However, there were dozens of switch points on the track at the park and several road crossings, both things that wouldn’t work with that sort of setup. Stumbling upon a bit of hacker inspiration, [Joel] turned to brake drums, which happen to be reasonably close to the correct size. They also have the superb quality of being relatively cheap and available. Almost all the parts were CNCed out of aluminum, plywood, or foam.

Given that the theme of the build was doing things to scale, [Joel] was mindful of the top speed of a minecart in the game, which is 8 meters per second or roughly 25 miles per hour, so he set that as his goal to hit. A beefy motor from an online warehouse and a lithium-ion pack allowed him to hit that easily; it was just a matter of doing so safely.

If you need even more Minecraft vehicles in your life, perhaps an RC boat might do the trick? Video after the break.

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TrackRobot Sports Welded Steel, Not Plastic

February 18, 2018 by Donald Papp 15 Comments

Don’t let the knee-high size of [Hrastovc]’s creation fool you. TrackRobot weighs in at a monstrous 60 kg (130 lbs) of steel, motors, and battery. It sports two 48V motors in a body and frame made from pieces of finger-jointed sheet steel, and can reach speeds of up to four meters per second with a runtime of up to an hour. The project’s link has more pictures as well as DXF files of the pieces used for the body.

Currently TrackRobot is remote-controlled, but one goal is to turn it into a semi-autonomous snow plow. You can see TrackRobot going through its first steps as well as testing out a plow prototype in the videos embedded below.

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