In August I published my first miniature robot design to Thingiverse. It gets a fair number of downloads. I called it “Tread-Bot” because it’s a simple robot that uses treads to get around.

The robot was designed to be a board-game piece, but in fact is a tad big for the game I was hoping to use it in. Rather than fitting on a nickel, it does still fit on a quarter; nonetheless, it pushes the design tolerances of my Afinia H479 printer. Some of these parts in test-print had to be increased in size to print right, but they do work.

I liked the design and saw it being part of a cute little line of robots.

Here are the parts of V2.0 of Tread-Bot in its final colors:

Tread-Bot was supposed to be just the first in a line of these miniature robots that share the themes of a somewhat organically-shaped body and head mixed with less organic, more machine-like parts.

It made sense, since I made the treads tri-tread shaped, that I could re-use the treads in different formats. I figured my second robot of the same theme should use the same treads but upside down.

While the second uses the same treads it is not “Tread-Bot 2”. Rather, I’m going to begin using the robot’s function as a name. This one was designed as a single-armed heavy lifting/carrying machine, and I created him with two strong fingers to grab things.

Here are his component parts:

(I created an alternative three-finger grabber hand too.)

So since this line is only just getting started (I already see several new designs in my head) I needed a name for the line.

The BOT-SHOPPE is born!

One of the people who downloaded the Tread-Bot model on Thingiverse printed one on a Form-1 (drooool!) and here is the result: