An ongoing problem in robotics is the calculation of body motion given motion in the visual field, also known as ego-motion estimation. This is a problem which has been solved in the visual system of most animals, including the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Here we present FlyWheel, an open-source robotic platform for studying models of the visual motion-processing system in insects. We showcase a dataset of rotational motion data in real-world conditions using the robot, and use a simplified model of the motion pathway in Drosophila as a baseline for further comparison and development.