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!