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Electrical engineering
Course: Electrical engineering > Unit 7
Lesson 4: Spider Bot- 6th graders learn to build a Spider robot
- Fun with Spider Bot
- Parts list for Spider
- Tools list for Spider
- Spider parts and tools
- Spider's click n' stick
- Battery and motor mounts for Spider
- Click n' stick base & batteries
- Spider's motor controller
- Spider's power switch
- Spider's bezel
- Spider's wheels
- Spider's Arduino Nano
- Motor controller connections
- Spider's LED eyes
- Spider's stabilizer bar
- Spider's romance
- Programming Spider
- Ben Eater's Spider
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Spider's wheels
Created by Karl Wendt.
Want to join the conversation?
- would it be okay to make the hole a lot bigger than use more hotglue?
Or is that not a good idea?(4 votes)- I don't think the connection would be quite as solid, because the hotglue isn't as rigid as the bottle cap and you might end up with a less than perfect joint.(3 votes)
- Why not use metric system ... Wouldn't it be easier to say 1 mm instead of 16 quarters of a half inch ....(3 votes)
- He could have done that, but in the US, where most of these robots will be made, most students are taught the imperial system and the metric system is harder for them to wrap their brains around, it's sort of like a secondary attribute. Does this answer your question?(1 vote)
- Can you use another thing than a bottle cap?(2 votes)
- yes just look around your house for something round.(2 votes)
- If it's called a spider bot then why does it have wheels and spiders don't have wheels?(3 votes)
- i mean if there were eight wheels that would make more sense but yeah your right.(0 votes)
- i don't have any O rings and they don't sell them at any local stores. Any other alternatives??(1 vote)
- Go to your local hardware store! If they do not have O rings, they are in the wrong business. good luck and good learning(1 vote)
- can we put rubber band insted off o ring(1 vote)
- You could, but an o ring functions much better as a tire.(1 vote)
- How big are the wheels (bottle caps)?(1 vote)
- Normal sized, about an inch in diameter.(1 vote)
- how much do u think the equipment would cost if i bot the equipment.(1 vote)
- can you use different sized eggs(1 vote)
- Is it called "Click n' Stick" or "Stick N Click"?(1 vote)
Video transcript
OK. So in this video,
we're going to show you how to attach the bottle caps
or the wheels and the tires, or the O rings. Now the wheels already
have some small 1/16 inch holes drilled in
them, but the holes are just a little bit too small. So we're going to
take our screwdriver and make them just slightly
a little bit bigger. It's really important that you
don't make the holes too much bigger because if you
do, they'll be sloppy and they won't fit
snugly on the axles. So we're going to push those on. And it should be pretty
tough to push on. You want to really give them
a little bit of a shove there. Now, one thing I want to
point out, in this video, I did things somewhat
out of order. It's important to put the
O rings on the bottle caps before you connect them. In this video, I put the
O rings on afterwards. And it's just a lot more
work to do it that way. It's a lot harder
to get them on. So put the O rings on first,
then put the wheels on, and you'll see how we connect
the O rings in just a second. OK. So what I'm doing
here is I'm just trying to make sure
that wheel spins true. So you can see that as I
turn it, it sort of wobbles. And you want to
keep adjusting it until it's almost
perfectly smooth. And then you want to do
the same to the other side. You'll put the wheel
on, the bottle cap on, you'll push it down,
and once it's in place, you're going to turn
it and make sure that it spins very smooth
and true and doesn't wobble. Once you've got
that, you can take it and turn it on an angle. And you're going to
take your hot glue gun and you're going to put about
a dime-sized blob of hot glue right on the center of the axle. And you'll hold
that perfectly up and down until the
hot glue dries. And then you'll do the same
thing to the other side. Make sure you don't
flip the bot around until the hot glue
is completely dry. It'll take about two
or three minutes. And the hot glue should
turn from clear to milky. Now we're going to connect
the O rings or the tires to our bottle caps. Now like I said earlier,
it's a lot easier to connect these O
rings to the bottle caps before you attach the
bottle caps to the axles. So don't do it the way
that I'm doing here. But in any case, what you
do is just-- in this case, I'm checking to make sure that
the hot glue is completely dry. And then trying to stretch the
O ring around the bottle cap. And it's a really tight fit and
that's actually a good thing. It means that our tires
aren't going to slip around. And they should provide
some good grip for us. So once we've got
the O ring on, you can see it's kind of
tricky to get on especially with it mounted in place. If it's on the table,
it's a lot easier to get on because you can push
down on the table really hard. OK. So that's good. So we have one tire in place. And then we'll attach the other
tire in the exact same way. Make sure everything
is true and straight. Get the second tire put on. We'll run the bot back
and forth on the table to make sure that it
is running smoothly and nothing is rubbing
up against the wheels. And it should move
very smoothly, and we'll be ready
for our next step.