Initially I planed on using this as an excuse to learn Fusion360 because the local hackerspace has a fairly active user group. I banged my head against it for a while, after a handful of hard crashes where I lost work I finally ended up with, well, you come up with the word. Mine isn’t sfw.

Initial rough outline of frame

At this point I got frustrated with Fusion being slow and annoying for SIMPLE tasks and also got infuriated with their camera controls for orbit being obnoxious (probably would have been less bad on a traditional mouse but Onshape works fine with a trackpad and keyboard, I’m spoiled) Oh, and the crashes. Did I mention that? What sort of excuse for a CAD program locks up when dimensioning a 2d sketch with no more than 10 lines? Then after work on Friday I was frustrated and needed to focus on something so I cracked open OnShape and did a quick clay model sketch to get a feel for the shape I wanted.

Rough shapes are defined and it already looks more elegant than the last one

So, let’s be clear, I HATE robots that just look like a box. I get that it’s easier to make or machine or fixture but dang it, I am doing this to push myself. Also, I’m 3d printing the dang thing, I don’t care about fixturing, I just need to hit print and magic happens. 3D Printers are like the Walt Disney of fabrication (/s) Anywho, from there I started refining interior details. Wheels and electronics bay Well, and some exterior ones, I modeled a reasonable Banebots T40 wheel to use because using a blank cylinder just didn’t feel right. It may not be 100% accurate but the functional parts are there and it’s aesthetically not garbage. From this early picture you can already start seeing where the electronics bay will go.

Motors have been roughly located

At this point I added in drive motors and started refining the shape of the drum. The original plan was to stuff a 22mm BLDC outrunner motor inside the drum. For a bit I played with the idea of centrally mounting a motor and running a flat belt. Then I realized that looked fugly and I didn’t want to do that. I tend to claim that if something isn’t elegant it isn’t right. So I kept revising and tweaking and looking for motors.

Revision 1 of the frame