Inventing wheels.. with built-in suspension =p

[jmaustpc]

interesting work!

My first thoughts are that one application for your wheel could be for a Moon/Mars rover wheel, where a pneumatic tire would be problematic....so are you thinking of making the rest of the gear needed for the trip? And do you want someone to come along for the ride?

Actually I just had a thought, since you are Russian (I think?) maybe you have found/bought some old hardware left over from the space race days....now that would be exciting!

Seriously though, image how much better the Apollo and USSR equivalent could be with today's technology. Even simple things like the electronics using vastly less power, could mean that the same basic hardware may have dramatically better capabilities/capacities.

[murdic]

Does any of you have ideas of how to model the sinusoid-like infill of the "tire"?

Extrude a helix normal to its axis, that's a sinusoidal profile.

Michelin has been experimenting with this principle for years, they call it "tweel" (tire & wheel. Didn't expect that, did we?) An article I remember reading about it mentioned that it isn't as forgiving as a pneumatic tire and conventional suspension, because it loses grip almost instantly, without useful warning.

Okay, reread your request and realized what you wanted: Attempt 2!

Trace a b-spline through the upper and lower vertices of a polygonal prism, I used a 36-facet prism for this pic. Scale a copy of the b-spline and loft between copy and original. Place a cone and derive a section between cone and loft. I had to jump through a few more hoops to get a result from that. I scaled a smaller copy and tried to loft between them, but there's a difference between the original and copy, so I had to downgrade the copy and rescale that, then lofted between them, then extruded that loft. I intersected the extrusion and a cylinder for the eventual infill candidate. There is plenty of room for improvement, of course.

[DeepSOIC]

Trace a b-spline through the upper and lower vertices of a polygonal prism, I used a 36-facet prism for this pic. Scale a copy of the b-spline and loft between copy and original. Place a cone and derive a section between cone and loft. I had to jump through a few more hoops to get a result from that. I scaled a smaller copy and tried to loft between them, but there's a difference between the original and copy, so I had to downgrade the copy and rescale that, then lofted between them, then extruded that loft. I intersected the extrusion and a cylinder for the eventual infill candidate. There is plenty of room for improvement, of course.

That is much messier than my method . And I don't need it to be sinusoidal... lines and arcs is the way I want it. Actually, the arcs are merely for smoothing out the printing process, and are thus not mandatory.

Here is a stripped version of my work-in-progress wheel model (stripped to make it fit into attachment). Please don't select DWires, doing so will crash master FreeCAD (it is due to me using my custom FreeCAD branch).

swheel v05 stripped.FCStd

(121.21 KiB) Downloaded 154 times

[DeepSOIC]

Actually I just had a thought, since you are Russian (I think?) maybe you have found/bought some old hardware left over from the space race days....now that would be exciting!

Yes I am Russian, but I don't have anything from space race days . I'm just trying to make new wheels for my kick scooter, just for fun .

Scale a copy of the b-spline and loft between copy and original.

That piece of your picture made me think of reorienting the infill and doing something similar to what I did for a turbine spindle

[drei]

I remember there was a macro to insert curves based on functions. If it could be updated/adapted to this situation, here are the equations: http://math.stackexchange.com/a/867311

[DeepSOIC]

Printing this one failed miserably

[PrzemoF]

I'll try to check why when I have some more time, but your model is causing hard crash on my laptop

[DeepSOIC]

I'd be glad if you fix the crashes. In any case, one can always get the final result by unzipping project and importing individual brep files.

[Alan Choi]

I hope you to complete your project in the future.

It seems really interesting!

[DeepSOIC]

Gone to a bit of trouble to generate this mesh:

swheel7 spokes mesh.png (438.68 KiB) Viewed 2271 times

I didn't manage to save the FreeCAD project with the shape. It's not a single solid unfortunately - it's a stack of single solids. Hopefully, Slic3r will be able to slice this stuff. EDIT: the stl file size is 98 MB.

4 gig of RAM feels a bit too tight when working with this thing. I'm thinking of custom g-code generation for this project, as this is what this mesh is supposed to do - to force the slicer to generate a special way to trace out the springy spokes.