I'm new and have been having a crack at building a Beetleweight

Hi to everyone on the forum.

I've been a Robot Wars fan for many years, and watched religiously when it was on TV back in the day. I always wanted to get into building a fighting machine, but was never able to get anything together. Thanks to all of the information and resources (and silently lurking) on this website, recently I got a few ideas to create a Beetleweight, due to off the shelf parts being easily available, a reasonable price, and of course the safety aspect of a smaller machine. in its first form its almost complete, so I thought I would show it to you guys. (hopefully these pictures work)

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(My youngest somehow managed to get in the 2nd pic:lame:)

Its a 4WD wedgy 4 bar lifter type robot, that I put together just for fun initially, but I'm leaning towards going for one of the Kinematics events, which is why I've also tried to make it compliant with the build rules (it has a removable link, it failsafes, power on light etc)

The chassis is HDPE (which a lot of people on the forum seem to swear by), outer panels are 3mm Polycarbonate and Aluminium. The lifter is powered by a 20kg servo, and the drive is also servos at the moment, but this will almost certainly change, as its crazy slow!

I'm not going to pretend that its a winner in any way, (far from it judging by the standard in the build threads section) but it does what I set out to do. It moves and drives, can lift stuff and looks pretty much how I wanted, so I'm pretty chuffed.

Naturally now that I've put stuff together, I now want to take it all apart and start again with all of the new knowledge that I've learnt :roll:

:O It's adorable!! That's super cool that you managed to build a bot without asking any questions here, and it's pretty damn neat-and-tidy too! Fantastic job.

Haha, thanks Rory. I'm not an engineer, and I don't do CAD in any way, so it took lots of experimenting, and cardboard mock ups etc, until I was happy. also, I really owe quite a bit to looking through past threads, it's a great resource.

looks good!

very nicely made well done :)

That's awesome! +1 for can't CAD / CNC lol. Please may you put up more pictures of the insides as am interested to see how it works :)

Cheers guys. Ok, internals! as I mentioned the weapon is powered by a standard type 20kg servo through a couple of bars to push on the furthest forward of the lifters arms, and the drive is actually 4 metal gear micro servos at the moment. These turned out to be a pretty poor method, but at this stage I was really just aiming to get the thing mobile, and without the need for ESCs this was a nice simple solution, going straight into the receiver. They are actually quite a bit more robust than I expected, but the small shafts to attach the wheels to mean they probably wouldn't take much to break in battle. Here it is with the lifter arm removed (cable ties everywhere!):
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This means that it is all powered by one 6v 950mAh receiver battery, slotted into the rear bulkhead, although i have plans to upgrade the drive, as it is 200g+ under the weight still, and have a selection of bits already to try out when i get time :)
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God this is so cool! Thanku for showing g me your lift arms is genius!