As a new member of the modrobotics team, part of my fun is hacking together new and exciting Cubelets! Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll be posting some of our behind-the-scenes Cubelet hacks we’re playing with here in the lab. Any of these could end up as production Cubelets, especially if you make your desires heard.

We have a backlist of new ideas, but we’ve also got eyes on our forum for suggestions, which is exactly where the first idea in this series came from: the roller Cubelet. (Thank you to Michael Tarr for the suggestion!)

After getting our hands on a roller ball and housing, we heisted a rotate block shell which had an appropriate size opening. After 45 minutes of running up and down from computer to the laser cutter and juggling little screws with a couple drops of super glue for good measure, we have the result you see here. The ball sticks down the same amount as the drive blocks to make a low friction omni-directional point of contact with the ground. Stable robots are happy robots!

More Cubelet hacks are coming! Stay tuned and flip over to the forum if you have any Cubelets you want us to make.