Servo - January 2012

FIGURE 11. Fleaweight bot Berserker internals.

FIGURE 12. Antweight bot WhipperSnapper.

FIGURE 13. Antweight bot Low Blow.

FIGURE 14.

Antweight bot Firag.

Flea in the competition.

There was one other innovative Flea weight bot — Zack Witeof’s Chairman Meow (Figure 9). Zack also uses a Baby Orangutan controller connected to a standard RC receiver. The Baby Orangutan controller has two bi-directional motor ports that drive Pololu metal gearhead motors. The code is Pololu’s 3pi RC program, which is available on their website www.pololu.com. The beauty of Zach’s bot is the cost — Baby Orangutan controllers cost only $20. That’s a cheap dual channel electronic speed controller!

The Antweight competition saw several of the 21 Ant combatants distance themselves from the rest of the field and fight it out for the gold. Andrea Suarez of Team Busted Nuts and her bot “WhipperSnapper” (Figure 12 — shown with the blade in the horizontal position, but by design fought with the blade in both the horizontal and vertical positions) fought their way to the final match after sending high school freshman Warren Purvin’s bot “Low Blow” (Figure 13) to the loser’s bracket in what can only be described as a fluke match. After Low Blow ripped a wheel off of WhipperSnapper, the wheel got stuck under Low Blow and raised him up so his tires weren’t touching the arena floor. It was a count-out for Low Blow for non-movement and another victory for Team Busted Nuts.