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Tiny Tank

Small 3D printed tank that can drive around forever

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Tiny Tank is a small, treaded vehicle which is fun to drive arount.
It is optimized for easy printing and extendability: you can easily design your own components to fit on the tank and mount them using the free holes on the frame.

Using the mounting bracket you can also add a wireless power receiver: this way you can drive it into a location fitted with a power sender and this way you can drive around forever.
A housing for the sender is also provided: so the tank can drive on the sender and charge itself.

For control I use a Particle Photon, but you can swap this for your own micro controller.
The vehicle is powered by 2 9g Fitec servo's, a cheap and easy item to buy.

The code for both the Photon and a .Net program are provided, which allows using an XBOX 360 controller.

Using the 3 LEDs in the front, you can also do the Knight Rider light effect, check out the YouTube video's! You will need to provide your own canon to mount on the tank...

Tiny Tank is a small, treaded vehicle, optimized for easy printing and extendability: you can easily design your own components to fit on the tank.

The Tiny Tank was developed as part of the Hackster.io 'Power without Boundaries' challenge (https://www.hackster.io/challenges/IDT-Power): a mounting bracket is provided to house the wireless receiver. A housing for the sender is also provided: so the tank can drive on the sender and charge itself.

Everything is fitted together with M3 bolts, which press fit into the openings. The treads are connected using iron wire, any type will do to make this work.

For control I use a Particle Photon, but you can swap this for your own micro controller.

The vehicle is powered by 2 9g Fitec continuous rotation servo's, a cheap and easy item to buy.

To build a tank you need:

  • 2 x Side Beam
  • 1 x LED Beam
  • 1 x Servo Beam
  • 4 x Wheel
  • 2 x Static Axl Parts 1, 2 & 3
  • 32 x Tread Element
  • 18 x M3 bolts (10mm)
  • 2 x M3 bolts (16mm)
  • Iron wire
  • Each of the IDT mounting parts for adding the IDT Wireless power

Furthermore I used:

To control the tank, I use code on the Particle, in combination with a console application, written in .Net. The Photon connects to the .Net application using a socket and small commands are sent to control the servo's and LEDs. This requires a direct socket connection, so connecting to another network segment can require additional configuration.

The controls in the .Net application support an XBOX 360 controller, which allows for easy control of the vehicle.

fzz - 46.02 kB - 07/20/2017 at 19:45

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Portable Network Graphics (PNG) - 94.46 kB - 07/20/2017 at 19:45

Preview
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particle_photon_code.ino

Code for the Particle Photon

ino - 4.01 kB - 07/20/2017 at 19:45

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visual_studio_code.cs

.Net code supporting XBOX controller

plain - 9.35 kB - 07/20/2017 at 19:45

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  • 1 × Particle Photon SoC dev board
  • 1 × IDT Qi 5W Receiver Prototype Kit (Optional) Wireless receiver
  • 1 × Qi 5W Transmitter Prototype Kit (Optional) Wireless transmitter

  • ESP8266 support coming soon

    Joris Bijnens07/24/2017 at 05:37 0 comments

    after buying some great ESP8266 chips I will be looking into merging the code to this platform. This chip is less expensive and so it further reduces the prices of the project!

  • All done

    Joris Bijnens07/24/2017 at 05:35 0 comments

    Tiny tank has been completed and can now be downloaded and implemented freely. Let me know if you have any issues!

View all 2 project logs

  • 1
    Print it

    Download the 3D part from Thingiverse and print them or have them printed

  • 2
    Get the other parts

    Check out the list described in the description of the project, for the parts you need. All are components you can easily find

  • 3
    Put it together

    Check out the images for aligning the large parts. All parts fit together using screws the need to be pressed into the holes. The model is self explanatory.

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