What do you get when you cross 7 hobby gearboxes with 14 wheels and a LiPo battery? Instead of speculating an answer, we can just check out one of [rctestflight’s] projects.
He came across those hobby gearboxes and thought it would be fun to build a 14 wheel drive contraption. Each gearbox has its own motor and is wrapped up in a nice tidy package also including the axle and wheels. All of the wheels mounted on a straight board wouldn’t be much fun so [rctestflight] used heavy duty zip ties that act as a flexible frame to connect one gearbox to the next. This allows the vehicle to bend and climb over obstacles while keeping as many wheels in contact with the ground as possible.
All 7 motors are powered by a single cell LiPo battery. In the video after the break it appears the vehicle can steer or that it is remotely controlled, but that is not the case. Once the battery is plugged in it just goes forward. This isn’t the first time one of [rctestflight’s] projects has been featured on Hackaday, check out his Free Falling Quadcopter Experiment.
Reminds me of the tomy toy from the 80’s that I used to have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebNcDTtUpKk
http://hackaday.io/Cazzwell
Yeah I was gonna say… not an original idea, I had that toy growing up.
There was actually a red one that had like a roller on the front and it was designed to climb straight up a wall, flip over into a “O” shape and loop back down.
I had one of those when I was maybe 5! And I cracked it open to see how it worked :’)
Truckasaurus!!! From Big with Tom Hanks
Reminds me of that Chicago incident with the subway:http://voices.suntimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/CHICAGO_TRAIN_DERAILMENT_45294695.jpg
Has many wheels, can apparently drive anywhere too.
Inhuman centipede?
There are human centipedes?
don’t go there, man
I haven’t seen it, is it really that bad? (c:
Not a centipede cause it doesn’t have feet… It should be more appropriately named centirota! :-)
Very nice!
I actually made something similar out of Lego when I was a kid. It had a single motor which drove all the wheels (I think it had 6 pairs) through 2 gear reduction blocks (sloooowly) and transferred power to each segment using shafts and crown gears (is that what they’re called?). It worked fairly well, but was somewhat delicate and didn’t last long before I took it apart and went on to the next thing, whatever that was.
Thanks for the ramble down memory lane, [rctestflight].
yea same here. i had a long axel with uv joints between 4-wheel segments with 3 segments total. this drove a worm gear against one of the old style differentials (not the really old style though, i think there are 3 different kinds) for each axel.
i had build a 2 axis gimbal with one of the crane turrets serving as the x axis, and some pins in the sides of the base the y (the top was connected to the other segment with an l bracket of sorts). the axel uv joint was centered on both axes. the y axes were free, but the x axis could be controlled with a motor. only the “front” turret was driven by a steering motor, the back one was free to rotate (i wanted to have a second linkage to connect both but i didnt have the parts).
the steering motor was in the center segment, and the drive motor in the front. the whole thing was controled with an rcx 1.0 though an infrared serial dongle to my computer. it was slow, very slow, and required the rcx to point towards the transmitter, but it worked and steered well.
Yours sounds an order of magnitude more complex (and awesome) than mine was, but I also built mine way back in the early ’80s, and my parts selection was a lot more limited.
Just think if you could steer/control the front two wheels. that’d be some military type tech.
nope you just use the joints between modules and bend the entire thing.
Well, there was this…
http://vempyre.net/picsmyft/letourneau-snow-train
And now we know the REAL source of crop circles :D
“This isn’t the first time one of [rctestflight’s] projects has been featured on Hackaday, check out his Free Falling Quadcopter Experiment”
The linked video is from 2012, the quadcopter project however is from last year. So you should have covered this one before the other one maybe?
Awesome! I wanted to build something just like this 10 years ago, but I was too poor, and more recently, lazy.
This would be amazing if it could steer. Use 2 steerable front wheels and ball joints in between each set of wheels