From the MS Paint archives!

[Marc ph]

Me and Andrew have a special process I send him a god awful drawing in MS Paint and we spend a week refining it.

Remember this stuff it Top Secret………. Hahaha just kidding.

Center Ankle

This is what the center ankle looked like in the beginning. We ultimately found this design to be cumbersome to which we will redesign at a later date. The problem was that getting to the bolt holes for the cylinders was just too much of a pain in the butt. So we have proven here not all designs are the best.

Battery Boxes

Here is the battery box in the woks. This design will most likely go through a few iterations but the concept is solid. Ultimately we want it to be similar to the skirt where we bend 1mm aluminum skin around an inner frame affixing screws as you go. We are looking at the first week of July.

Foot Shells

We will get around to foot shells. So foot shells have always been elusive but with some of our latest designs I believe we are at a point where there very much possible. This piece will be the inner skeleton and the structural support will be the inner channel screwing down on these parts. Once there locked in place the outer skins will bolt to it locking all 4 sides down. There will be a separate skirt the attaches on the bottom.

[Marc ph]

Omni Ball

Remember when we wanted to do an Omni wheel. Well it’s still an idea we just got side tracked. I still think this will be an amazing option but it just seems like we would be replacing an apple with an orange both are perfectly good fruit they just taste different. It’s a cool idea but what improvement over our current design?

323 Transition

I really believe we can make a better 323 transition well here was the gear box concept. So most 323 designs in the leg use a long rod that pivots on an an axis so when you think of the motion it’s an arc. This will create a binding point it may be minor but you may see slight stability issues. With this design there would be a more linear motion governed by the gear it would be smooth fluid like transition. The cost to machine the linear gear may not justify the replacement.

MSE Shell

Sometimes I doodle on grafting paper. This is one of my favorite designs. Using the tapered bot allowed use to use 3 plates to crimp the bottom in place with out needing any inner supports. That allowed us to only use supports in the top of the lid. Most of the bolts were positioned so they would be hidden with greebles like the side circuit board and the top greeble. All other screws can be skimmed with bondo and painted over. This was the first design we used “T” slots on and now you can find them in everything we design.



Some of the early sell concepts did not make it into the final cut originally we wanted 4 plates with one split into pieces to lock the sides. we soon realized this would be over kill and we diched the locking plate for a pressure fit.



Sometimes simple drawings are the best to convey a concept. Andrew has a knack for taking my scribblings and converting them into something amazing. This is a side profile view of the top shell as you can see this is close to what we came up with for the final design.




Notice the amazing MS Paint of the counter sinked screws now that's talent!

[Marc ph]

Astromech Leg

Originally I wanted to bend the leg curve but Andrew came up with the stacking idea. That was brilliant Andrew. Other issues we faced when doing this was trying to get it to match club spec which I still can’t believe we pulled off. Coming up with ways to support the different hubs and hiding all of the front screws behind greebles this was a fun design. One of the things that was a challenge was how to have the screws bolt with out threading the part then I sent Andrew a coupler I had on the floor and said why don’t we cut hex holes and rip these in. Andrew can do anything with CAD some of the stuff he pulls off amazes me.



Here is a much earlier concept of the leg design this is before we came up with the couplers we where originally going to use spacer tubes but that would have required much more work on the end users.

[Marc ph]

Outer Ankle

The outer ankle started off looking way different in the early days. We changed it a lot trying to get it to club spec Our final version was off by like 1mm and that when Joey suggested we should change the plate thick ness order and make the outer plates .125 eureka that what what we where missing.

[Marc ph]

Trying to simplify the design as well as keeping the cost down we changes up the cut time for the inner skeleton.

A few new ideas for a locking plate on the front foot shell. I know its missing a lot of tabs. I got lazy Ill clean it up later but you get the idea.