Redesigning a Beetleweight

As we continue to unpack from the last Motorama, we're checking out the remains of the 'bots we took, and looking to see what's salvageable and what needs to be reworked. Tonight it's the turn of the beetleweight we took: Didactic Duelist 1.0. Hit Back after viewing an image.

There were some obvious wounds, courtesy of Jim Iocca's Mr. Croup. The sides are cracked and bent, and obviously it's missing a weapon disk that came off in a match.

Close-up of the back-left corner. A multitude of things wrong here, including the weapon motor pulley came off, and the drive motor fell off the gearbox! And the general mess inside there, presumably from the floor of the arena.

On the other hand, having powered up the 'bot, you can see the orange receiver light and two green drive ESC lights, so the electronics are good - we were able to run the drive and weapon motors just fine, so that's a plus. It seems what we need at this point is a fresh chassis to put the pieces back into.

Starting with the frame, and we need to keep the dimensions the same as the first version, because we want to be able to re-use the titanium plates we had cut. Instead of 100% polycarbonate, the outer side walls and rear wall will be 1/4" 6061 aluminium.

Adding the 1/8" polycarbonate baseplate and the 1000rpm Hobby Motors for drive, with the aluminium axle 'enhancers'. Note there's no center wall this time around.

We've moved the motors closer to the rear wall than they were in the first version to the BaneBots ESCs (red boxes) need to sit in front of the motors rather than behind. The wheels are going from 1.5" diameter to 1.75" diameter, and with that they protrude past the back wall and top plate, so hopefully we'll be a little more invertable.

The rest of the components are the same: battery, receiver, weapon motor and ESC, and powerswitch. This time, though, we're putting the pulley on the end of the weapon shaft, as the teeth will be welded on this time.

And there you have it! Albeit without the purple paint on the titanium front plate. At present we're estimating a whole three ounces available for wiring and screws, so we may make a couple of posts for the top panel to truly make it invertible.