I’m getting a better feel for how pieces should fit together, and how much or how little of a plane is necessary to keep in a design.  This is the initial exploded view of the car.  It uses two motors, one driving the left side and the other driving the right.  There’s a simple 1:1 gearing mechanism to get both wheels on each side to travel in the same direction.  It has kind of a payload on top that can hold 4x AA batteries, so each motor can be powered by two of them.

There’s no power switch or onboard computer yet.  It’s too small to comfortably fit the Arduino board on to, so I think I’ll put a miniaturized controller on – there are StickDuinos, Boarduinos and a number of other extremely miniaturized variants that would do nicely.

I haven’t actually had it cut and assembled yet, but I was so pleased with the previz system I put together for it that I had to show it off.  Behold, the realtime animated assembly in Unity3d!

Move the mouse around to orbit the assembly – hit pause / play to toggle playback, and use ‘slower’ and ‘faster’ to change the playback speed.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

With the gold-ish material on it, it looks surprisingly steampunk.  I kind of like it, although the real thing will be made of MDF.  I look forward to seeing it!