I was thinking of placing a round "Roll cage" bar on each side and have the actuator roll the robot sideways back onto its wheels let me just draw out what I'm thinking on CAD one sec
Hi. Thought I'd put a post on here as I'm also 15 and in the middle of my GCSEs and I find everything you've said easy to relate to.
First of all I don't want to discourage building a heavyweight at all! I think your enthusiasm is great and we don't have enough people who want to build a heavyweight, for whatever reason. Having said that, I think it would be quite a huge task for any fifteen year old. I've been involved with this hobby for nine years now and I think I would just about manage to get something going by myself, but I would struggle, I doubt by any means it'd be a top robot straight away, if at all!
Having read this thread the impression I get is that you want to build a heavyweight to gain experience for the career you want to go into in the future and to look good on an application for university. With regards to the experience side of this, I don't personally think (having been involved with the build of both heavyweight and featherweight robots) you get much, if any, more experience out of building a heavy than a feather. The theory and practices behind both are more or less the same, the main reason heavyweights take so much longer to build is due to the difficulty of building something on such a larger scale. Even simple things such as moving the robot about, turning it over, can be difficult when you're first building it and don't have the luxury of the hydraulic trollies everyone resorts to buying! With regards to value in a university application, featherweights and heavyweights of similar designs are often just as complicated to design and build. Inside, Explosion and Eruption are extremely similar in terms of complexity (besides custom build gearboxes, but many feathers have these too!), the only added difficulty for Eruption was the scale as I've mentioned. I assure you building any sophisticated feather, be it pneumatic flipper, axe or spinner will look impressive coming from a fifteen year old (who's not yet an engineer and/or had years of experience like most of the top robot builders!).
One thing you said that jumped out at me was that you've got a few projects planned and once you've finished this one you'll move onto the next. I may be mistaken but based off this I'm not too sure you know what you'd be getting into building a heavyweight, I'm sure anyone who's built one will assure you it takes quite a large amount of commitment. With regards to Eruption, it cost £3000, and took nine months to build (and that considering that the main builder of the robot was an engineer with 20+ years experience). I can't quite understand how you could justify this investment of time and money then just to move onto your next project.
As for myself, equally my aim is of course one day to build a heavyweight by myself, but I don't feel I'm ready for that yet. I'm built a feather this year for the first time completely by myself. It took me four months to build it (admittedly it would have only taken two months if it wasn't for my weekends being taken up by numerous robot events), but it did take longer than I imagined, and it was more difficult than I first imagined also. I took it to the Gadget Show Live and it only had one fight due to an ESC failure, but when it worked it worked well and I know exactly what to do to make it a serious competitor for next year. Of course I love driving Explosion and Eruption, (and Explosion will continue to be my favourite robot of all time), but I got a much larger sense of satisfaction out of driving something I'd built all by myself, and that's what's made me decide I want to build my own heavyweight to run alongside Eruption sometime in the future. Even after nine years in this hobby, building a feather completely by myself taught me so much and in hindsight was definitely the most logical step to make.
I don't want to put you off building a heavy at all, in fact I'd encourage you to do so, but I'd advise it's best to build up to that. I'd first advise you to build a featherweight version of what you want to build, and perfect the design and gain experience before moving onto a heavyweight. That's what we did and it worked as Explosion's the UK champ and Eruption won Robot Wars only a few weeks ago
Hope that gives you something to think about!
is that a drum spinner i see on the front as there arnt any arenas that can take HW spinners
You wont be allowed to use that drum thing on the front. There are no spinners allowed in any heavyweight arena in the UK. Featherweights are the only class that can use spinners.
Any reason why they don't work?
One error with the cage is that the apex of the circle is meant to be lower the actual top of the pyramid
roll bars and cages don't work
Something a bit like that the thing poking out of the top is a actuator pushing the robot to roll back over
Tried them on a feather years ago. Getting them to reliably work was a no no. Worked around 50% of the time if you were lucky. Too easy for another machine to pin you against the wall.
And yes spinning weapons are not allowed in heavyweights as the arenas can't contain them. If you want a spinner you are building a featherweight as only the robochallenge arena can contain them which is a feather only arena.
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