For our robotics project, we made a universal mount for our parts.
Tile is a generic mounting system designed for small robots.
This is just a shape with screw coordinates, that is used on most of our parts.
It is a specification of dimensions of one mount position with positions of four screws.
The idea is that one can attach anything to said position, from 3D printed parts to PCBs.
This makes it possible to use the parts as lego, where you can move things around the robot, because they all share the same mount.
This gives as abillity to easily reuse parts and rebuild the robot in different configuration easily, same way one could expect from LEGO.
Apart from the shape itself, the source file `tile.scad` also contains SCAD modules that are parts itself.
The key difference is that it is more sturdy (as screws are used) and it is easy to make compatible PCB.
We prepared two sets of tile dimensions - T24 and T36. We however solely rely on the T24 for one. Which is guaranteed to not to change.
We intentially designed the tile to allow mounting of parts on thin wall from both sides.
The T36 size is subject to change in the future.
This is achieved by shifting the holes in a way, that when the shape is flipped, the holes won't collide (even when one uses nuts to screw something in place)
## DXF
The position is shaped like square with beveled corners, this makes it possible to form a grid of mount positions.
Bigger parts can overlap multiple tiles, it is up to designed to decided whenever that is sensible choice.
Corners are beveled to create a spot between positions on grid for wires.
dxf/ folder contains .dxf renders of various tile configurations, these should be importable by other CADs and software.
Given that we use this for 3D printing, the models expect nuts to be inserted in the models to get proper screw thread.
## example
The most used configuration T24 is 24x24mm square with four positions for M2 screws.
example/ folder contains example of included modules in SCAD that you can use, such as simple tile:
The tile is used in our robot Koke heavily https://schpin.org/robots/koke.html and we allready benefited from this on another robot that just reused a lot of the parts.
## Repository content
The main truth for the tile is it's SCAD library - `tile.scad`.
The rest of the repository is as follows:
***dxf/** contains dxf shapes for some grid layous that can be directly imported to other CADs made with SCAD. Note that SCAD approximates circles with n-gon.
***example/** simple examples of tile shapes that can be used
***extra/** contains more complex models using tile, such as holder for raspberry or 90degree bracket.
***pcb/** PCBs used for our robot designed in KiCAD that are Tile compatible.
## PCB
We also have a set of various PCBs using this shape as their PCB shape, these are in various stage of development.
