The arms are going to be the single biggest difference maker when it comes to overall width. As part of my research I gathered a list of several Slash-compatible arms and their lengths. If you’ve got more arm lengths to add to that list, please comment below.
Bandit arms are 67mm wide, while the stock Slash 4×4 arms are 92mm. Just by making this switch we’re going to remove 50mm of overall width, bringing it from 296mm wide to potentially 246mm – less than the goal of 249mm. So we have some width we can add if need be.
Here you can see two sets of Bandit arms compared to the original Brushed 4×4 Slash arms:
Can a Slash 4×4 transform into a trail-worthy RC crawler? I don’t think this is a new question, in fact Ultimate RC did something very similar with a Stampede 4×4 almost 10 years ago.
I took some of the cues from that build and wondered if we couldn’t do it even better. I don’t intend to keep it track worthy like Jang’s Chimera, but can we make it truly trail worthy?
There’s a place I like to race at in St. Peter, MN called Shamrock RC Raceway. It’s an interesting setup because it’s a turf track set up outdoors in a hockey rink that would otherwise go unused in the summer. Rather than bring an insane extension cord to power my charger from the park restroom, I wanted to come up with a more portable (and green) charging solution.
So I put together this simple solar charging setup:
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I recently saw this picture on Facebook – amazing 3D printing results from the Creality Ender 3 using the Ultimaker Cura slicer with the “Creawesome Mod”:
The Cura downloads you can get for Linux right from Ultimaker are AppImages. Basically bundles of software that can run on their own without having to install anything else. Super easy, just download the file, set it to executable, and run it. But how does the Creawesome mod install?
The Creawesome mod is a zip file with a folder in it called “resources.” I just needed to figure out where to put it. I tried putting it in ~/.config/cura/4.0 on my Ubuntu system but that didn’t do anything. The clue that it is working, according to this video, is that I should see a Creawesome mod splash screen.
But I wasn’t having any luck.
Deconstructing the AppImage
Since the AppImage is a bundle, I thought that maybe they need to go inside of it. The AppImages delivered from Ultimaker are “version 1” app images. Those types of AppImages can be mounted like a filesystem for further inspection. I used these commands:
But, we can’t just overwrite that folder and unmount the image. The image itself is mounted read-only. So I made a full copy of the directory and then unmounted the original AppImage.
$ cd /tmp
$ cp -a cura_mnt cura_image
$ sudo umount cura_mnt
Repackaging the AppImage with the Creawesome mod
I removed the resources directory so I could copy in the Creawesome mod resources directory.
This should create an updated AppImage with the Creawesome mod called Cura-x86_64.AppImage. I renamed mine to Ultimaker_Cura-Creawesome-4.0-x86_64.AppImage and put it right next to my original Ultimaker_Cura-4.0.0.AppImage file in case I need to fall back to the “vanilla” version.
When I was looking to get my daughter her first RC car, I eyed the Dromida Wasteland series of vehicles. That line is discontinued, but you can still occasionally find them at local hobby shops or eBay.
After researching them, I found out they have a combined ESC & receiver which would not easily allow me to replace the transmitter & receiver for a left handed version.
So when I saw a Dromida Wasteland truck body show up on eBay, I snagged it. The Dromida Wasteland and LaTrax Prerunner are both 1/18 scale and have similar wheelbases – 165mm and 179mm respectively. Being the same scale means the bodies should be proportional and more importantly swappable, albeit with some tweaks. The 14mm difference in wheelbase is about 1/2 inch, but I figured I could kitbash these two into one to make it work.
