ZinZam

Actuators

To make your mouse go, you will need a decent actuator. You will need at least two, depending on your design. Either one for each wheel, this is known as a wheel chair configuration when you have only two wheels, or one for drive and one for steering. The wheelchair configuration is the easiest to build, because of this and having only had experience with the wheelchair configuration I will only speak about it.

Brushless DC Motors

If you are unfortunate enough to be using brushless DC motors, then there are a few things to note. You will need to know where your motor pole is. For a wheelchair configuration, this will vary with the changing dynamics of your mouse! The pole for pure translation is very different from the pole for pure rotation.

If you are lucky your motor will come with a datasheet specifying what the motor parameters are. If you are unlucky your motor will be a black box and you will have to experimentally obtain it's parameters. If you are really unlucky, your two motors will be significantly different from one another, this is particularly true of the Geared Lego Motors given to us. A simple experiment such as this one can be used to obtain the parameters for a DC motor.