ViaBot Models

The majority of the more interesting models I get to build are hidden behind NDAs; with products that won’t launch for another few years. Lucky for me, I have some awesome friends that are designing and building a multitude of cool projects. And here we have Viabot!

“Viabot is company that creates self charging, self-emptying sweeping robots designed to maintain and monitor a company’s facility.”

This was a particularly intricate project as Gregg had no idea exactly what I was going to create when I asked him if I could create a couple 1/18th scale models of their main robot sweeper. Admittedly, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to build either other than “really cool models with as much detail and functionality as made sense”.

And as you will see below, I went a little crazy with the amount of detail I was able to scale down and print with FDM 3D printers.

I was given the production model file which had details down to the threads & washers to build the entire unit. The running joke was “which of these files is going to crash my computer first”.

I knew going into this project that the individual pieces from the production files weren’t going to be a simple “scale down, export, print”. But I did not realize that I was about to re-model 98% of the comments to create successful miniature prints.

The real magic came with using legitimate pins from wrist watches in order to create functional hinges in the lid and rear doors of the sweeper.

There’s a whole lot more photos, videos, and timelapses of this build that I will be including hopefully soon. But a content creator I am not… so bear with me.