Building a small tank

The good people at the York University Computer Science department gave me a voucher as part of my prize for the NASA Space Apps Challenge and what did I spend it on? Parts!

Thanks to Amazon's frequently bought together feature I picked up 2 kits from Tamiya and an Arduino motor shield. If it is not already blindingly obvious from the title one of the kits was a track section, originally designed to be driven by a single motor, moving the tracks together. The second kit takes this very useful base and makes it awesome by adding a dual gearbox, so each track can be controlled independently. Voila! Proto-tank  

Over the weekend I put together the gearbox, which was actually really nice to tinker with. I had a bit of a bash at knolling when I had all the parts off the sprue. The kit does not come with a lot of explanation, but there are images showing different layouts for different gear ratios on the box.

The next step was to assemble the base. The track system was fairly straight forward. In an ideal world I would add a spring assembly to the idle wheel at the back to pick up the slack in the treads and I do have enough spare tread material to do this, but it is not the most important thing for me to be doing with it right now, so can be put on a back burner.

Because track base kit was designed for a single gear system, which I have also put together and am hoarding for a future project, the double gearbox was slightly too wide to screw directly into the wood of the track base. Instead I shaved notches out of either side and screwed the gearbox onto a piece of plastic strip which was spare from the two kits.

I have not added a battery pack as this will all be attached with the Arduino, but I couldn't resist trying it out, so below is a video with a test power supply from my breadboard hooked up to one of the motors.