Where to go with our budget

Hi all,

Long story short, our Uni society has a budget for making some fighting robots, and I'd like your opinion on what would be more worthwhile.

As it stands we have a good engineering background and access to tools and machinery (including free 3D printing), but a limited material and parts budget, of somewhere around £100 - 150 ish.

We're considering either building a whole bunch of antweights, a few less beetleweights, or 1 featherweight.
We'd like to build into a class that is active in the community that we can find some fights for, but for the ant and beetle classes, we'd also be running our own internal tournament. I'd be interested in knowing what you think would be most worthwhile?

We have around 20 members that turn up to every meeting, and around 5-10 that have expressed interest and started to 3d print prototypes for an antweight.

In the long run we'd like to design a common chassis and system for all the robots we create, and encourage our members to add on the weapon and make minor adjustments etc to the design, 3D print their ideas and test them out against the rest of the bots, so that for newcomers and first years there's as small of a barrier to entry as possible.
This way we can buy a couple of sets of batteries, recievers, motors etc. and share them amongst as many designs as possible so we can eek out our budget.
I'd imagine that once they're comfortable with our "standard" bots, they could go off and make their own. Does this sound feasible? (bear in mind that's more of an "at some point" goal at the moment)

At the end of the day, none of us have any experience with this at all, and I'd appreciate any pointers.

Thanks,
J Thomas Morris

You'll be struggling with that budget.

Even a cheap Transmitter/Receiver combo will cost 40 at minimum.
And you'll need at least two for a internal competition.

Where are you based? Antweights and beetleweights are the best scale to build to for club events on a limited budget as it's fairly easy to build a makeshift arena (unless you build spinning weapons). Outside of the club, antweight and beetleweight arenas/events are most popular in mid to southern England, antweights having their own events and the beetleweight arena being at most heavyweight events run by event organiser Robots Live.

As Niels said, the budget it quite low. You'd only get maybe a few ants out of it, a beetle or two and very little in the way of a feather. The transmitter/receiver costs are better than they used to be but the £40 Niels mentioned is for one of the more basic models so two of these would use up over half your budget. Could perhaps be an idea to encourage the students to buy their own RC gear (which they can always transfer over to another robot if they decide to branch out) and that would free up more budget for parts. A website called Technobots sells small continuous rotation servos for about £6 that are ideal for a basic antweight drive. They don't need an external speed controller to control them as it's an all-in-one unit, so you'd just need a battery, add in the receiver, an additional normal servo (for a basic weapon) and throw it all into a chassis to get a few ants on the go.

We have a couple of RC transmitters and a few receivers available from previous projects, so that's already been sorted - forgot to mention that :/ .
We're based out of Cardiff if that makes a difference.

Thanks for the advice, We'll probably go for the ant weights.

If you have access to a 3D printer then antweights would make the most sense. A few 360 deg servos along with a chassis and you have a mobile platform. Add another servo with an arm and you have a flipper.

There are a few people that sell antweight kits for about a hundred quid all in.