Single Flex PCB Folds Into A Four-Wheel Rover, Complete With Motors

You’ve obtained to hand it to [Carl Bugeja] — he comes up with some of the most intriguing electromechanical designs we’ve noticed. His most recent venture is proper up there, too: a single PCB that folds up into a four-wheel motorized rover.

The essential to [Carl]’s style lies with his PCB brushless motors, which he has been refining considering that we very first spotted them back again in 2018. The idea is to use traces on the PCB for the stator coils to travel a 3D printed rotor that contains small magnets. They do the job incredibly nicely, even if they never produce a enormous quantity of torque. [Carl]’s adaptable PCB style, which incorporates metal stiffeners, is a bit like an unfolded cardboard box, with two pairs of motor coils on each of the side panels. This leaves the other surfaces available for all the electronics, with features a PIC, a driver chip, and a Corridor sensor for every single motor, an IMU and proximity sensor for navigation, and an ESP32 to operate the display.

With machined aluminum rotors and TPU tires mounted to the folded-up chassis, it was off to the races, albeit gradually. The absence of torque from the motors and the light-weight fat of the rover, alongside with some undesirable friction because of to unwell-fitting joints, included up to gradual development, especially on anything at all other than a useless flat surface area. But with some tweaking, [Carl] was able to get the buggy functioning properly enough to get in touch with this one particular a acquire. Look at out the develop and tests in the online video beneath.

Realizing [Carl], this is not the last we’ll see of the foldable rover. Immediately after all, he caught with his two-wheel PCB motor design and ultimately received that functioning rather effectively. We’ll be retaining an eye out for development on this just one.

https://www.youtube.com/view?v=PsZszv4qHu4