Parametric Robot Wheel (Spiral) by CodeCreations

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

NOTE: This has been upgraded to a much more flexible version that incorporates all previous designs and adds lots of new features.
The new version is here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:21486
This is a flexible parametric robot wheel with a "spiral" pattern for o-ring tires. It's a variation of the biohazard wheel code here thingiverse.com/thing:21010 -- but it's tweaked a bit to support the spirals design specifically. (At some point I'll probably try to join them all together...)
You can modify a number of properties in the OpenSCAD file to suit your needs, including tire size, wheel width, rim height, number of spokes, spoke width, spoke curvature, spoke direction, hub height/diameter, shaft size, set screw diameter/thickness, number of set screws, and fillets/chamfers. Or, if you need an STL for a specific size o-ring, just let me know and I'll try to accommodate.
This spoke design with some tweaks is coincidentally very similar to the excellent "Parametric airless tire" created by tjhowse at http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:17514, except that I didn't even consider that it could function as an "airless tire" -- this was intended to be rigid. This design also started off as a logarithmic spiral, but I abandoned that idea for the much easier to render semicircles. But because it's pretty configurable, this can be probably be used get a nearly identical look -- just without the tread, of course. I'm not really sure about springiness, because this design incorporates a rim an o-ring.
Wheel Designs using the same foundation:Biohazard: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:21010Circles: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:21065Spoked: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:21064Spiral: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:21277
...and more in the works!