You’ve acquired at hand it to [Carl Bugeja] — he comes up with among the most fascinating electromechanical designs we’ve seen. His newest challenge is true up there, too: a single PCB that folds up right into a four-wheel motorized rover.

The important thing to [Carl]’s design lies together with his PCB brushless motors, which he has been refining since we first noticed them again in 2018. The thought is to make use of traces on the PCB for the stator coils to drive a 3D printed rotor containing tiny magnets. They work surprisingly nicely, even when they don’t generate an enormous quantity of torque. [Carl]’s versatile PCB design, which contains metallic stiffeners, is a bit like an unfolded cardboard field, with two pairs of motor coils on every of the facet panels. This leaves the opposite surfaces obtainable for all of the electronics, with features a PIC, a driver chip, and a Corridor sensor for every motor, an IMU and proximity sensor for navigation, and an ESP32 to run the present.

With machined aluminum rotors and TPU tires mounted to the folded-up chassis, it was off to the races, albeit slowly. The dearth of torque from the motors and the sunshine weight of the rover, together with some undesirable friction resulting from ill-fitting joints, added as much as gradual progress, particularly on something aside from a lifeless flat floor. However with some tweaking, [Carl] was in a position to get the buggy working nicely sufficient to name this one a win. Try the construct and testing within the video under.

Figuring out [Carl], this isn’t the final we’ll see of the foldable rover. In any case, he caught with his two-wheel PCB motor design and ultimately acquired that working fairly nicely. We’ll be preserving a watch out for progress on this one.