This is just a quick update on the OpenADR project. Last night I hooked up the motor driver and ran a quick test with the motors hardwired to drive forward. I wanted to verify that the motors were strong enough to move the robot and also see if there were any necessary tweaks that needed to be applied to the mechanics.

Looking at the result, there are a few things I want to change. Most notably, the center of the chassis sags a lot. The center was dragging on the ground during this test and it wouldn’t even run on carpet. This is mostly due to the fact that the test chassis has no sidewalls and PLA isn’t very stiff, so there’s a great deal of flex that allows the center to touch the ground. This can be fixed by adding some small sidewalls in the next test chassis revision.

Additionally, I’m not happy with the ground clearance. This chassis has about 3.5mm of ground clearance which isn’t quite enough to let the wheels rest firmly on the ground in medium pile carpet. In light of this, I’ll be increasing the ground clearance experimentally, with my next test having 7.5mm of clearance.