Back at Motorama 2012 we debuted a new fairyweight, Trancendental Terror 1.0, with a titanium spinning blade attached directly to the motor driving it. It was a decent design, but it had one fatal flaw - it wasn't invertible, and lost two out of three matches by being flipped. We decided to see if we could tweak the design to make it invertible. Hit Back after viewing an image.
Here's where we started, by sketching to try and lay out the components. This was our third attempt, and happy with it we decided to switch to CAD and see if it would make weight.
The baseplate went through a few iterations as we trimmed more and more weight off the design aiming for that magical 150 gram mark. The baseplate is 0.03" titanium, waterjet-cut, along with the plates for our antweight.
The chassis walls were originally designed to be 1/8"-thick polycarbonate pieces - we didn't want to do the one-piece chassis block like last time because it was awkward to work with. Just to give a sense of scale, the chassis is roughly three inches across.
One thing we're keeping from the first version is bolting through the 'bot to keep it together. These are 7/8"-long #0-80 screws and nuts. Note the notch in the front wall for the weapon motor wires.
With the baseplate on, we've also mounted the Pololu 30:1 HP drive motors, which will have 1.5" Lite Flite wheels attached for the drive train. We know from our antweight these will be more than enough to make the 'bot mobile.
The weapon motor and blade combo are transplanted directly from the first version, but sit parallel to the base of the 'bot, rather than angled, and the whole 'bot will be angled anyhow, due to the size of the drive wheels.
Next we need to pack the electronics in the 'bot. The green boxes at the back approximate the FingerTech TinyESCs we'll be using; the large blue box is a 3S 180mAh LiPo battery pack; the transparent orange is the OrangeRx receiver; and finally under that is a 10A brushless motor controller for the weapon motor. Not shown is a BotBitz power switch which will be mounted over the two drive ESCs.
And here's the 'bot all bolted up. The hole in the top plate is simply because we didn't want to design different top and bottom plates - this way we can have three identical ones cut, and use them interchangeably. The 'bot actually rides on the front lip of the baseplate, and if it ends up flipped, it'll ride on the same point on the top panel.
As we're bolting through the walls, they don't need to be able to hold a thread, and so we could switch the polycarbonate for UHMW, which would save a few grams of weight, plus it comes in black, so we'll paint the top and bottom in Team Radicus purple.
Adding it all up, we have a few grams free, but this doesn't include the four bolts for the weapon motor and six bolts for the body, but then again this also shows polycarbonate walls, not UHMW, so we're thinking that all-in-all we can safely make weight.
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