Open Melt Is a "Melty Brain" Translational Drift Robot, Spinning Like a Remote Control Beyblade

The Open Melt "melty brain" translational drift robot project aims to deliver an open source 3D-printable antweight reference platform for experimental robotics — and, or so the idea goes, remote-controllable Beyblade-style battles.

"A translational drift robot spins its entire body using its drive wheel(s), but is still capable of directional control by modulating motor power at certain points each rotation," Nothing Labs' Rich Olson explains of the project — a concept which gave rise to the term "melty brain." "To achieve this, the rate of rotation must be tracked."

The Open Melt, which offers a reference platform for translational drift robotics, uses an accelerometer to track the rotations. An LED is lit once per rotation, marking the robot's "front" — a key visual indicator which lets the controller know where the robot will move when steering.

In use, the robot — brought to our attention by Adafruit — looks not entirely dissimilar to a motorized Beyblade, though unlike the disc-battling toys can be controlled remotely. As a short demonstration of the devices shows, though, an Open Melt can deliver quite a Beyblade-like punch in the arena — spinning at speeds up to 3,200 revolutions per minute, with Olson claiming "significantly higher speeds" should be achievable.

The current Open Melt is a "complete recode" of the original project, swapping native AVR code for Arduino sketches for improved accessibility. Inside the reference Open Melt build is an Arduino Micro or other Microchip ATmega32U4 microcontroller board, an STMicroelectronics H3LIS331 accelerometer good to 400g, and one or two motors with motor driver — plus that all-important heading LED. An RC receiver connects to an external controller for steering.

The project is documented in full on Olson's GitHub repository, where the design is provided under the reciprocal Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.