MonsterBorg with Mecanum wheels?
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Hi,
First time poster here and so far, very impressed with your products. I am about to back the Monsterborg on Kickstarter and I had a few questions:
1) Would it be possible to use Mecanum wheels on the MonsterBorg? Can you please share what is the bore diameter of the motor? I am guessing I would need some sort of hubs to fit the Mecanum wheels to the motor?
2) The Kickstarter states that the big rubber wheels are approx. 100mm. What is the smallest diameter of wheels which will give adequate ground clearence to run the MonsterBorg indoors (asking because the larger the diameter, the more expensive the Mecanum wheels).
3) Is daisy chaining the ThunderBorg possible, so that each motor on the MonsterBorg can be individually controlled?
Thanks!
piborg
Tue, 03/21/2017 - 14:26
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MonsterBorg with Mecanum wheels
Thanks, we are rather proud of our robots and control boards :)
1) With the single ThunderBorg provided in the MonsterBorg kit it would not be possible as Mecanum control needs four independent motor outputs. This can be done using a second ThunderBorg though (see 3). The motor shafts are 6 mm in diameter, we provide these 6 mm hubs to fit the wheels in the kit.
2) It depends on the battery pack used. With the provided 10x AA battery pack then 80 mm diameter wheels would be the absolute minimum. Running upside-down I would say 70 mm diameter. If you could get a nice thin battery pack then you can probably go even lower again if you do not mind it getting stuck when upside-down.
3) Absolutely, the ThunderBorg will allow the same daisy-chaining code as we used with the PicoBorg Reverse. To operate a four wheeled Mecanum robot you would need four individually controlled motors, meaning two ThunderBorgs. The only challenge will be mounting a second ThunderBorg onto the MonsterBorg somewhere :)
It should be fairly easy to modify our ZeroBorg based Mecanum example to work with two ThunderBorgs instead. This would give you joystick type control over the robot.