Featured This Month:
Features
24 BUILD REPORT:
Today’s Beetle —
Tomorrow’s Champion?
by Kevin M. Berry
27 MANUFACTURING:
A Color to Dye For
by Pete Smith
29 PARTS IS PARTS:
Integy iNDi 16x4 Pro
Battery Charger Review
by Pete Smith
30 RioBotz Combot Tutorial
Summarized: Design
Fundamentials — Part 2
by Original Text by Professor Marco
Antonio Meggiolaro, Summarized by
Kevin M. Berry
Events
28 Apr/May 2009 Completed
and Jul/Aug 2009 Upcoming
Events
28 EVENT REPORT:
Ideas Festival, Australia
by Nick Martin
33 BATTLEBOTS RETURNS!
Stories From the Trenches
by Kevin M. Berry
ROBOT PROFILE – Top
Ranked Robot This Month:
35 Original Sin by Kevin Berry
24 SERVO 07.2009
BUILD REP RT
Today’s Beetle – Tomorrow’s Champion?
● by Kevin M. Berry
Repeating the intro from Parts
1 and 2: After a hiatus in
building, I’m heading back into
the arena. As part of my
research, I’ve kicked off a series
about conversations on the
Antweight forum on Delphi
(
http://forums.delphiforums.
com/antweights) regarding the
current state-of-the-art in insect
technology. Building on the
Ultimate Ant and Intro Ant
threads, I asked the community
for recommendations to
incoming new builders on
constructing a fully competitive,
three pound beetleweight bot.
For pumping the forum’s
expertise, I laid down the
following groundrules:
Assuming the following:
unlimited budget (but not, as one
wit put forth, building your own
gearmotor factory!) for components
(but value matters too, not just cost);
two driven wheels; spinner (drum,
disk, horizontal, vertical, doesn’t
matter); 2. 4 GHz RFL compliant
radio system. Don’t worry about
raw materials or manufacturing
unless very specialized.”
This post — quite similar to
the previous Ultimate requests —
drew out three veteran builders.
This article presents their bot.
For baseline purposes, my
beetleweight John Henry —
especially built for SERVO in late
2005 — will serve. This was a
pusher, but the drive train and
chassis components were all top
notch. JH fought into 2007, and
was pretty much wrecked in close
encounters with some savage
vertical spinners. As the pics
show, along the way I figured out
that all the pushing power in the
world didn’t help if your wedge
was tiny, so I traded a set of
drive wheels for a massive,
Dean’s Ultra
connectors can
create a reliable
power link.
