Week of 1/5

This week I spent my time brainstorming and finalizing a design for the wheels. After finishing the old design for the wheels I found one major flaw. Due to how small the motor shaft was, it made the wheel connector far less stable than that a larger and more defined shape to fit to the wheels. Due to the the motor shaft shape being very close to a circle, when moving the wheels at all while attached to the motors caused the filament to completely strip away losing the tight connection between the wheels and motor shaft.

As a solution to this problem, I decided to try and implement some sort of set screw into the design of the wheel. After printing it out, I then threaded a 3mm screw through the extra hole to lock together with the flat part of the shaft to allow for the wheels to be locked for tightly to the motors. This plan turned out working excellent with the all of the wheels fitting on snugly without the worry of them stripping like the old design did so easily

The last thing that I worked on this week was finalizing to new type TPU filament which I would use for printing the tires. After researching the many various types of TPU along with their strengths and weaknesses, I settled on using the 85A variant. This type of TPU has a great balance between the traction and flexibility I am looking for, as well as still having a slight firm feel which can be printed using our 3d printers.

85a TPU