Recently our team has been discovering issues with both different types of omni wheels, and we were wondering what the forum’s opinions are on which type of omni wheel should be used.
Grey Omni Wheel
Green Omni Wheel
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I find that with Grey Omni wheels, they have minimal slack since they use high strength shaft inserts, however the grey sliders on the wheel are a different material from the green wheels, and after a large amount of use many of these have started to crack, and also get jammed quite a lot preventing clean rotation of the robot. The green wheel sliders don’t seem to have this problem, which is why we prefer these wheels, however the shaft slot is somewhat stripped on every single one of our green omni wheels giving them large amounts of slack. I’m wondering whether anyone has found ways to make wheels which don’t have either of these problems, such as either replacing the sliders on the grey ones or the shaft slots on the green ones?
To deal with slack, if you have a gear or sprocket on the same shaft (not actually sure on sprocket) you can screw standoffs into the gear that go through the wheel to ‘lock’ it into the gear. I’ve found that this greatly reduces slack, hope this helps!
Our green omni’s have these as well. Maybe you are using the old version, which had non removable plastic centers. If that’s what you have, then yeah, those stripped and cracked all the time. If your rollers are getting stuck, they might just have a lot of dirt built up on them which can easily be washed off with soap.
Unless you have some secret inside information I am unaware of, this is not true. While the wheels have been discontinued pl they are still on the website and in the clawbot kit, so they are probably going to stay for a while.
You can likely pass standoffs through the old omni-wheels, and screw the gears onto them to pass motion to the wheel directly as compared to through an axle. This will drastically reduce slop and improve the longevity of the wheel.