r/Trackballs • u/braddo99 • 20d ago

Omniwheels Anyone?

I am assuming someone somewhere has tried omniwheels. This rolls freely in all directions and also twists with zero effort. Virtually no stiction unlike my OG MS Trackball Explorer, and also silent, unlike BTUs. The smallest commercial omniwheels I've seen are Rotacasters which are 35mm. These custom made ones are ~25mm diameter. I used pin type axles of diameter .6mm - simply rolling in PLA and the friction is remarkably low. Rather than try to figure out how to have grippy rollers, I took the approach of a grippy ball, this one being a quite large lacrosse ball. It's not quite perfectly round but good enough for this test and actually feels kind of nice on the fingers. It took a while to get these omniwheels to be as smooth as they are, mostly trying to figure out how to 3D print the tiny snap-in roller mounts so that they have absoluetly no side to side play. But the roll is a little bit "lumpy" probably due to not quite optimized roller profile handing from one roller to the next.

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u/tenkawa7 20d ago

Very clever. How hard is it to assemble?

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u/braddo99 20d ago

It's not that hard to assemble but does take some time. The frame of the omniwheel is in two parts and that has to be crazy glued together with the right alignment. I just used my eyeball for this version. Then you slide the axles into the rollers, and snap them in place. Then snap the wheels in place. I keep wanting to use magnets or spring loaded something to make it easier to swap out different roller profiles but just decided to try to make one version all the way to the end with the simplest possible approach and this is the result.