Building an Inexpensive 3-D Printed ROS Robot
Built around a Pi4, low cost gear motors, and an RPLidar A1
I recently began playing with ROS in simulation, and am really enjoying it. I want a platform that I can use for experiments, particularly learning to configure a physical robot for SLAM and navigation. If you are not familiar with ROS, or have been intimidated by the steep learning curve, you might want to give my introductory article a look first.
I stumbled on the Weddell 2 ROS Robot by user pokpong on Thingiverse, and was very impressed. It was very close to what I was after. I couldn’t source the motors the original device used, so I made a remix of that design that was set up for inexpensive gear motors with encoders. I hope this write-up is useful if you want to do something similar. The modified files are here.
The chassis is printed in PETG on an Ender 3 Pro. The parts require rafts and supports to print without warping, and the supports need to be gently cut away with an hobby razor knife. Holes tend to print a little small because of the way the slicer works, so it’s best to drill them to size.
The original design used some German gear motors that I had trouble sourcing (and frankly, they look expensive). They are probably overkill for my application, so I opted to modify the…
