One of my New Year’s resolutions was to build a bunch of the kits that have accumulated in the basement over the years. Among them a cheap 4-wheel-drive robot chassis (well, actually the previous version, which will become significant in a paragraph or two). I had unboxed it and soldered wires on the motors months ago, so why not spend an hour or two following the instructions some more?

Lasercut chassis de-papered, check. Brass standoffs installed, check. Big rubber tires available, check. Four gearmotors bolted to chassis — oh, wait, make that three gearmotors. So I scoured the basement. Several times. Then I emailed Terry at Yourduino asking if perhaps they had a spare. Two days later the package arrived. Except the manufacturer had changed the design of the robot chassis to use gearmotors that have the electric motor in line with the gearbox instead of at right angles to it. And the gearbox is thicker than the original version and has mounting holes in different places..

So of course — between other projects — I started designing a little printable adaptor that would fit the laser-cut slots in the chassis but still be able to mount the gearmotor so that its shaft would line up with the shafts of the other three motors. All this just because I wanted to get the fershlugginer kit assembled and off my work table.

Then this morning I was down at Local64 (because I had put a bunch of files in my Dropbox folder there to use at home, but not the one I needed) when I looked at the bin of random components and solderless breadboards underneath the 3D printer. I don’t know that there’s really any moral to this story.