Eyeing another toy hack
Posted July 12, 2008 by kym
What with all these toy sales on now, I’ve been doing the rounds of the various supermarkets and looking at large-scale toy cars &ct.
In case you hadn’t noticed, and maybe are interested, the following base looks like it could be hacked into a reasonable large-format wheelbot.
Yes, all-plastic construction — apart from the motor mount and steering linkages.
The motor is a pretty nice (but cheap — i.e. $20 on ebay kinda thing) 12v with some grunt, at least by the usual hobby robot standards.
At present it’s selling around $400 aud, but on sale it’s 199.
I guess someone over-ordered, or summin. 
I think I’d look great in the pink one. Of course if you sprayed it red it would go faster
haha
I was looking at these in one of the big toy store chains and they’d be fine after changing the plastic wheels with rubbery (maybe even pneumatic) versions.
A lack of suspension could also be a problem too - after a little while everything would start to come unplugged, desocketed, hairline-cracked, etc. Little kids are soft and squishy, so they have their own in-built suspension, but electronics is all rigid. Maybe suspension could be added to the box holding the electronics instead of to the wheels?
Ground clearance is good and the motors are, as you say Kym, designed to lug around 50 kgs of load, so these things might just be what I’m looking for. I hope they’re still on sale, or somethin’…
I was thinking the suspension can go over the top after you trim off the rear “roll bar” cum seat back.
I’ve been experimenting with “active suspension” — i.e. some gyros attached to a set of linear actuators connected to the (presently) corners of a 60cm sq bit of chipboard. The base of the actuators are connected to the corners of a same-sized other piece of board.
If you tilt the bottom board a bit, the idea is the sensors can “quickly” adjust the orientation of the upper board to still remain level.
I’ll need to add in some accellerometers and more complex s/w to actually damp down any up-and-down motions.
But the experiment has proved 1/2-successful, so may eventually appear on the converted Ford RC truck (that now looks a bit like a Mars rover — similar size, too! :).