How OOMWOO’s 3D design gets made
OOMWOO’s mechanical design is not drawn from a blank sheet. It starts by researching ready-made parts that can’t be 3D printed (motors/sensors), capturing their dimensions, tearing down and reverse-engineering consumer vacuums to learn the state-of-the-art – and remaking that into a novel, 3D printing friendly design. Here is how that pipeline works.
Start from parts you can buy
The starting constraint is availability. Motors, wheels, blower fans, electronics and sensors cannot be 3D printed – and must be purchased. I search these usually on AliExpress and pick for being cheap and abundant, not for being ideal. A part that exists, but nobody can order is of no use. The sourcing choices, with part numbers, are written up in how to source the BOM.
Scan them
Once a part arrives it gets 3D scanned. Some of that happens on my desk with a Creality Raptor – here it is capturing a vacuum suction fan assembly.
A tiny team doing the heavy lifting
Scanning is the easy half. Turning a mesh into clean, editable CAD is slow, so that work goes to freelancers on Upwork, who convert the scans to STEP and Fusion 360 models. One freelancer also bought a Roborock Qrevo 5AE outright, took it apart, scanned it and converted the whole thing – which is a fast way to get a complete, working reference for how a modern vacuum is actually packaged.
Follow OOMWOO build
Open-source robot vacuum community build updates
What comes next
None of these assemblies can be used as-is. They are accurate copies of somebody else’s parts, so the next pass is to test them, tweak or completely remake them and ultimately make them 3D printable: splitting pieces to fit a printer’s build volume, reshaping to cut supports, and adding the tolerances a printed part needs but a molded one does not.
The plan for materials is split. Gears go to SLA, which holds tooth detail well enough to mesh. Enclosures and brackets go to FDM, which is cheaper and tougher for large parts. The first printed assemblies are landing now, and the results will show up in the build instructions.
Related: hardware bring-up covers what happens once these parts are on the bench – pinouts, connectors and measured currents.
