Robot platform in progress

Entire post got deleted while I tried to fix the alignment between the photos shown below. The Blogger WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor is terrible for images, column layouts, etc. In short: I've been working on a lot of things recently, but haven't posted because posting takes time and effort and you need to get good photos of stuff and find a good stopping off point on those projects that never end.

The biggest thing I'm working on now is a robot platform that will be open source. The brain will be the Wixel and the cost will probably be in the $50-$60 to build it yourself. The gear/wheel/mounts prototype are shown below. To give you a sense of scale, the wheels are 9cm diameter and in the assembly shown below, the distance from the wheel to the motor terminals is about 7cm. The first goal for these will be to build seven of them myself and use them to run some fun programming competition aimed at adults/experienced programmers at Sector 67. Past that, I'll probably use these with an Arduino (in addition to, not instead of the Wixel) if I teach a robotics class this summer again.