Maz

This was my second trial truck. It was built from a scratch as the first one (Star 1144) turned to be unsuccessful. Maz was much faster, failure-free, and looked way better.

It had pendular suspension based on turntables, but used shock absorbers were too soft and because of it the stability suffered. It was equipped with portal axles with 3:1 gear reduction. The overall gear ratio was 5:1, so it was quite fast. I was very happy about the place where I placed the NXT brick - behind the second axle, low over the ground and at the angle that allowed to slip from things :).

Truck was also equipped with the winch driven form the driving motor.

The biggest innovation about it was the way it was controlled. I wrote the program for mobile phone that sends simple commands to NXT brick via Bluetooth connection. On the brick there was another program in Java language (written using LeJOS) that receives commands and controls motors. It hadn’t limitations that FunkNXT did and I was able to steer motors completely independently, but sometimes it hanged up, even during the races.

Brickshelf gallery

Truck can be seen on the following video at the beginning: