Guest Curator Emmett Lalish has this to say about this 3DxMechanicals project: “This is one of the few gear-ball designs that I can say with confidence was in no way derived from mine. The math involved in this thing is quite spectacular; it has that awesome property of being regular while appearing irregular. Hats off to apal.”
Print the core, 12 pieces of gear A and B while 8 pieces of gear C. If you want to use 2 M6 hex keys to rotate (see video), print 2 pieces of gear A_hex6 and 10 of gear A, instead. Use the M3x10 screws to mount the gears to the core.
The core is a partially truncated version of the dual of the truncated octahedron. The dual of the truncated octahedron is also known as tetrakis hexahedron. The core has 24 not-so-regular pentagonal faces and 8 regular hexagonal faces. Mount gears A and B to the not-so-regular pentagonal faces accordingly, then gears C to the hexagonal faces. Gear A has 27, gear B has 18 while gear C has 21 teeth.
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
