There are presently many different platforms with some pretty amazing capabilities available to base a robotics project on these days. I'm a fan of both Arduino and Beagleboard Black so therefore am really looking forward to the Arduino Tre. The difficult and time consuming part of many projects, for me at least, is getting the mechanical portions in functioning order in a reasonable time frame. Machining one-off parts is expensive in both time and materials and very frustrating if they dont work like predicted.
In light of that, I have been looking around for an easier, faster and cheaper way to test out mechanisms before I fire up the milling machine. The best thing I have found so far is the Actobotics line from Servo City @ www.servocity.com . It is a pretty big assortment of high precision 0.125" thick aluminum extrusions, with all sorts of beams, hubs, chains, sprockets, bearings, shafting and other parts that can be connected by actual #6 screws so the assemblies look to be sturdy enough to use for pretty strenuous physical testing. There are components for rotary, linear and servo motion.
I don't know of any other product like this, but I would be willing to look at other options. Are there any out there?
Thanks!