11-08-2006 10:18

Greg Perkins

Re: pic: My first Lego Swerve Drive

Ahhhh,

Ken's breaking out the old-school legos, with the old-school motor controllers! See kids, you can still have fun with the toys that we used to use when we were little.

Looking good ken, how does it function?

11-08-2006 10:33

Ken Leung

Re: pic: My first Lego Swerve Drive

It works pretty good actually. The only trouble is that the lego chains I use to rotate the direction of the wheels are a little weak. I am using two sets of chains, but they still have trouble when the drive system is moving on thick hairy carpets.

That's why I have these wheels on at the moment, they are much smoother and have less load when the wheels rotate. When I take this to the class later today, I plan to switch to rubber wheels.

Ultimately I may have to gear down the rotation motor even more to generate more torque, and use a third set of chains to keep them from snapping.

Gotta tell you though, legos are lots of fun!

11-08-2006 10:44

Morgan Gillespie

Re: pic: My first Lego Swerve Drive

Heh, for a while I was working on LEGO swerve drive but without the turntable piece, and I found it is hard but not impossible, if you drill out the center of large LEGO gears it is possible. I had two working modules made in fact I still have them. Lost interest in finishing it though. I might post a pic if I can find my camera.

OK found camera, it was in it's case. So I took 4 pictures with my cat partially in some. I know it currently has the worst gearing system ever, yet it was 2:30am and I just wanted a working system before I went to bed. I woke up the next morning with ideas on how to get it working right, correct gearing but got distracted and was too lazy to pull out all the LEGO boxes from LEGO camp. There is 6 boxes and 2 bins. Stack attack bins. All in my small cramped room.

11-08-2006 21:45

artdutra04

Re: pic: My first Lego Swerve Drive

I remember the good ol' days of using LEGO before Mindstorms and RCXs... we had to use line coding and the LEGO Datca interface. Although having the huge number of input and output ports was a plus, the main board had to stay tethered to the Mac. So you couldn't make mobile robots without the equivalent of a trans-Atlantic cable of Lego wires.

16-08-2006 23:56

cire

Re: pic: My first Lego Swerve Drive

I tried making a swerve drive for lego's 2 years ago and i cound out that i didnt quite have the right parts/right logic at the time, it was very hard.

Earlier this year I gave it a go again and i made a very interesting type of swerve drive, it only had 2 wheels and a skid to keep it balanced, it worked pretty good surprisingly.

Nice job on your work, swerve drive is so much fun to show off when you get it to work!