Let’s start from the ground up, shall we?<\/p>\n
I took the easy route and bought a premade 6-wheel robot chassis. I would, however, urge you to think about building your own, or at least purchasing a different model. While my chassis is certainly going to suffice, it has a few design flaws that, had I known beforehand, would have had me reject it.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, it is what the robot is based upon, so let’s look it over.<\/p>\n
The rover is based upon a prebuilt chassis from Dagu<\/a>, called the Wild Thumper<\/a>. I purchased mine at RobotShop<\/a>.<\/p>\n I bought this chassis as it looked sturdy, and some videos I saw on YouTube certainly made it seem capable of running outdoors. And, for the most part, it is a pretty decent chassis. It has room for a couple of LiPo’s plus some electronics, and the chassis material is pretty sturdy.<\/p>\n But it also has a few design flaws, two of which are pretty serious in my opinion.\u00a0 I’ll get to those in a bit, first let’s look at the specifications of this chassis.<\/p>\n The chassis came completely assembled, except for the wheels. They fitted on with a single Allen screw each, and the key was provided in the kit.<\/p>\n There was a one-page “instruction manual” provided with the chassis.<\/p>\n My kit was “prewired” with the motors going to a terminal strip. However, the wiring online was incorrect, as they wired the center wheel to the wrong motor group! No big deal in my case, as I wasn’t planning on using their wiring anyway, but it doesn’t say a lot for quality control.<\/p>\nChassis Specifications<\/h3>\n
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