We spent some time sizing up the fairyweight (150g) opponents for Motorama 2012, and decided that a simple lifter wasn't going to cut it, so we needed something more offensive.Hit Back after viewing an image.
We decided to go with a weaponed 'bot, using as many components as we already had available, so drive motors and TinyESCs, a battery, receiver, and 1.5" tires, and we're already at 81 grams out of 150g allowed in this weight class.
One of the nice things about both fairyweights and antweights is that you can usually sketch a design at 1:1 size. Here we're planning a layout for the components.
Plus said components overlaid on the design. It's a bit messy, but you get the general idea. The wires will all need trimming, etc., and we need to hit the CAD program to find out how much a chassis will weigh to accomodate all these parts.
To try and make things both neater and easier, we taped together the 350mAh 2S LiPo battery and the receiver. Together they make a ni 2" by 1.25" block.
This was our first attempt at a chassis design, but unfortunately came out too heavy, even using UHMW rather than polycarbonate, so we had to rething the layout a bit.
Rather than put the motors outside the battery, how about if we put them behind the battery? There's space on top of the motors for the weapon ESC, and space in front of the motors for the drive ESCs.
This is the top half of the chassis, with pockets for the internal components, and a slope on the front where the weapon motor will be mounted.
And here's the bottom half of the chassis - the hole in the front is simply to save weight. The two halves of the chassis will be bolted together with 1"-long #0-80 screws and nuts.
The weapon motor is a 2204-14T brushless outrunner, the same as we're using in Poor Punctuation 2.0, and the 0.071"-thick titanium blade will be super-glued/expoxied to the outside of the can, again just like we've done in the antweight. The red brick is the 10 gram ESC for the motor.
With the 'bot all assembled, it hopefully will be a fairly tough competitor! Although it has a touch of Little Rat about it - we hope the wheels stay on ...
And of course, some team colours. Although we may end up reversing this, as the two chassis pieces will be milled from black UHMW, so we may just paint the blade and be done with it.
According to the Tentacle Torque Calculator it should be a zippy little thing:
Although weight is cutting it a bit close! There aren't many places we're going to be able to shave off weight, but we'll see what we can do ...
Oh - and I guess we need to come up with a name for this thing too ...
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