Sawppy the Rover

Here's a short video clip of the alpha build chassis, showing that the design works.

This project is open and fully intended for others to build their own Sawppy the Rover. The design is not fully baked but as someone who is personally frustrated by many "it'll be shared when it is ready" projects, I'm putting my own project out there in all its incomplete awkwardness.

What's available today:

Onshape CAD document: Sawppy is developed in Onshape, a web-based CAD (computer aided design) tool usable on anything from Chromebooks to full power engineering workstations. (You will need a good internet connection.) Hobbyists can create a free account to access public Onshape documents like Sawppy. This is the live development file with all its upsides (latest update!) and downsides (latest update doesn't work!)

I've already received several requests to release Sawppy CAD data in OpenSCAD format. Sadly my OpenSCAD skill is not good enough to create Sawppy's geometry. If anybody is willing to take my Onshape design and convert it to OpenSCAD, please let me know and I'll be happy to link to your project!

Github: For those who don't want to create an Onshape account, the 3D printer data files (STL format) exported from Onshape is also available and hosted on Github. This will be a periodic snapshot of designs that have been printed and verified to work on Sawppy. This is good for casual browsing and printing my designs as-is but any editing should be done via Onshape. 

Build blog: CAD and STL is good for conveying the what of Sawppy, but they won't necessarily cover why. The build blog describes the design decisions behind Sawppy. Each daily blog entry is a short ~300 word story about one specific topic.

After receiving positive feedback about the techniques I used to build Sawppy, I decided it was worth writing up to share on Hackaday.com. This is a technique I've been evolving over the past few projects (see my profile) and it's been a really great way to bring ideas to reality. It won't be the way to build every project, of course. Use the right tool for the job, etc. And now, this tool is available to more people!