Ivan Miranda’s Giant 3D-Printed Tank Is Now Drivable

Ivan Miranda is a YouTuber who is known for making creative 3D-printed projects — especially big ones. That includes the world’s largest NERF Gatling gun, a huge permanent marker printer, and a gigantic 3D printer for helping with all of those. A few months ago, Miranda started working on a massive 3D-printed tank that is big enough for a full-grown man to actually ride inside of. When we first featured this project two months ago, Miranda had completed the 3D printing portion of the project. Since then he has made a lot of progress, and the tank is now drivable.

The entire tank is made from 3D-printed parts, and you can see how gargantuan it is. Even with Miranda's speedy 3D printer that he previously built, all of those parts easily took weeks to print. But he managed to pull it off, and had all of the mechanical parts completed when we last updated you on the project. Since then, he has been hard at work on the electronics to actually make the thing move. That is a lot of weight to move around, as it includes the 3D-printed parts, the battery bank and motors, and Miranda himself when he’s inside — though it can be controlled remotely as well.

The plan was originally to use brushless motors and VESCs (Vedder Electronic Speed Controller), which are similar to the ESCs often used on drones. But to improve performance, Miranda decided to switch to an ODrive motor controller. That has encoder positioning support, can handle either 24V or 48V, and can push out a peak current of more than 100A for each motor. The tank is using 24V, which means that it can push 2,400 watts per motor, an absolutely tremendous amount. There are many ways to control the ODrive, but he is using the PWM output from an RC receiver. That lets him drive the tank using an RC remote transmitter from either inside of the tank or outside. Miranda still has some small tweaks to make, but the tank already seems to be performing quite well.