BattleBot is the original chassis this whole rover lineage is built from: four independent DC gear motors (JGA25-370 class) in a tank-tread layout, driven from a single motor shield. The chassis itself is one printed piece, designed in FreeCAD and sized to fit a Bambu Lab A1 mini's print bed.
Recon First, Combat Later
Rather than jumping straight to armor and weapons, the first build is deliberately a recon/spy bot — camera mounted, no combat hardware. That keeps the early iterations focused on getting the drivetrain, chassis, and motor mounting genuinely solid before adding anything that has to survive an actual hit.
Built From Real Measurements
The motor mounts, wheel hubs, and ground clearance are all derived from hands-on measurement of the actual hardware — ruler photos of the motors and their mounting brackets, cross-checked and refined through several rounds of test prints. Every mounting revision has fed straight back into the CAD model, so the chassis keeps getting closer to a clean fit around real, off-the-shelf parts rather than idealized datasheet dimensions.
Compute & Power
Brain hardware is still being finalized — a Raspberry Pi Pico, Pi Zero 2W, Pi 3B, or ESP32, depending on what the final electronics layout needs. Power comes from a battery pack driving both the Pi and the motor shield.