Quote Originally Posted by PJ-27 View Post
It can be quite disheartening though when you see other machines that have hundreds of pounds spent on them, tools that you simply don't have and engineering skills you'd only obtain from working in the industry. But that isn't the only road to success.

Take Guilherme and his machine Galactus. Fastest spinning weapon at the champs this year. The brushless setup cost him ~£50 new. Design smart, buy smart.
Definitely! Hardwired was made out of the absolute basics, with the absolute basics (minus the joins on the aluminium box, but they were done already) so I'm just going to have to get a bit more creative here and there!
I think the main thing I'm focusing on at the minute is armour - something that can at least stand up to the spinners for some manner of time, because 2mm aluminium... not really got a chance, has it really? I like the idea of a wooden bot with the obvious bonus of wood being generally lighter than steel and what have you so you can have more of it. Not sure how that'll help, but it's something... I really need to do my research and/or actually fight I think first!

Wow, £50 too? That's very impressive - I don't suppose there's a build diary for Galactus anywhere? I'm not feeling comfortable building a full on spinner (yet) but I could definitely use a powerful setup for the lifter on Hardwired, and a lot of the more powerful brushless motors I've seen are pretty expensive, though again it might just be my inexperience there. Brushless might not even be the way to go for lifters, I really don't know! D: Thanks for the advice!



Quote Originally Posted by Eventorizon View Post

I am stunned and impressed by your £60 budget. Conker 1 was built, excluding mistakes, for around £800 and it left the champs on 3 wheels and in 6 pieces.

How much does Hardwired 1 weigh approximately? I am guessing nowhere near the 13.6kg limit.

I reckon you should start on paper. Get the dimensions of the parts you want to use and then do side, front and top views of the internals by hand with a ruler. At 1:1 if you can. That will help you get a proper sense of scale to the machine. From there you can plan how best to pack the items together. What has made my last 2 robots so difficult was that I forgot to plan where I would lay the wires around the machine. The result was a spaghetti that was near impossible to repair when things started blowing up.

If you can, try and angle the corners or lean the armour in slightly, this will help against both vertical and horizontal spinners. Cos that is what everyone is afraid of! Even I am and our team has 2 of them!

Can wait to see those plans!
Thank you! I think the £60 is only that low because the aluminium box was donated (was scrap) otherwise it'd be up a fair bit I'd think... It's not got proper speed controllers nor batteries in it either - I've reused as much as I could from the two drills, and it runs on servoes which means it's about as easy to maneouver as a small planet...
If I were to make it competitive though, I'll need a lot more than that £60! Rest assured too, if I entered Hardwired in the champs, I'm sure it'd probably come out of the arena as a thin paste... I'm hoping to make something that can be easily repaired to that degree as well for now... I know that's kind of an oxymoron, but I'd love to have a design whereby parts can easily be taken out and replaced if damaged - at least until I get experienced enough to build something that can stand up to the damage better... It's the worry of buying a couple of hundred quid's worth of electrical parts and to have them get broken because of sub-par armour, that's the thing!

And nah, definitely not... It's about 4kg in its current state, but I have just taken a lot out of it, namely the old spinner system on the back that was quite unsuccessful (powered by a small motor and makeshift belt, managed to get about 300 rpm from it at the most...), as well as the extra batteries and scaffolding to go with it - it was much closer to the 9/10kg mark with that in.

Aye, that does sound a very good idea - might crack on with that soon, thinking about it - I want to use the existing HardWired design for now, but I'll get all that sketched out to play around with where everything's going to go. I'm not sure on the actual parts yet though, I want to keep everything cheap but I need upgrades now... Practically building a new machine from scratch, in all honesty. I like the general design at the minute though, so I'll use that as a basis and expand on it, hopefully I'll get somewhere with that! Definitely get some angled armour in there too - that does sound like it'll help a lot! I can't blame them being scared of those spinners though, I mean - the amount of energy stored up in those things must be absolutely incredible!

Thanks, shall get those posted fairly soon-ish!

Quote Originally Posted by Mouldy View Post
Galactus is on paper is about 13krpm, 720 in practise is actual 13600rpm
Well, that's me not getting any sleep tonight!
Seriously though, that is insane! No wonder 720 does all its crazy breakdancing moves with that sort of speed! How heavy's the drum on it?