With the completion of our heavyweight, which we'll still be managing and updating / fixing where necessary, myself and Colin looked for other things to do. We've a few ideas coming up, but for now we've decided to try to build a beetleweight in 24 hours. To clarify, that would be 6-7 sundays, as we tend to do about 3 hours 30 to 4 hours per sunday, rather than doing an all nighter and spending 24 hours together doing it in one go.
A long while back, I bought a load of BW components, with the intention of building my own bot, however a housemate later and lots of waving goodbye to motivation, that never occured. I do however, still have the components. So last sunday, I took them over to the workshop and myself and Colin decided to try our finger at something much smaller and lighter than our HW tunred out. But on top of that, let's see if we can do within 24 hours of work!
So on Sunday, we took count of all the parts I'd collected for a beetle, and got to work. Colin had already thought of a basic design, using a PVC pipe and another material to make a basic T shape, with electrics all squeezed in there, and a wheel at each side of the machine. Colin had recently been to a car boot, and got a box of varying scrap metal parts, where we found two circular pieces of metal that fitted almost perfectly over the pipe, and some of the scrap metal left over from the HW build, these were welder together over the pipe, using a damp cloth to cool things down quickly enough to not melt or set the pipe on fire, to give us our basic T shape. We checked the battery fit within this T, and thankfully it did! Panels were cut out of both sides of the metal T, to give us more weight to play with.
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Next, we hit lots of road bumps. We couldn't get the solder to melt and shape accurately using irons available at the workshop. So I took them home, and have soldered all the motors to their wires. I'll later solder the XT60 caps to all the motors, and i'll take my 60/40 Tin/Lead solder and my soldering iron next Sunday session as these together seem to work infinitely better than what is to hand at the workshop for some reason.
Colin also cut out a layer of plastic to cover up the hole in the T, as this is where the battery goes, so we need to protect that all we can. We also found out the beetle motors, mount and wheels we had all fit immensely well inside this pipe, considering i hadn't relayed any information about the parts I had bought. So this is the basic shape - at this moment nothing is secured on, except for the chassis T, everything else is floating here.
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We've not got any solid ideas for a weapon at this point, although we know where it'd need mounting. We also need to modify the ESCs, VEX #29s, to ensure they work correctly with the higher voltage we're using here. I've been linked to a how to guide, so i'll be looking at doing this soon. So from what we can see, other than some screws i've already ordered, we're pretty good to go, with no immediate parts obviously missing from my collection of prebought BW parts.
At the end of our first 4 hours, we have the basic shape done, and confirmation of parts fitting in there. I took another 20 minutes at home, soldering the motors to their wires, so next week we should be in a good place to pickup and keep up to our 24 hour time frame.
So this is what Team Death are currently working on, other than updates and repairs to The Mean Machine. Hopefully we'll be able to succeed in our 24 hour plan, and not only do ourselves an achievement, but show that with a bit of ingenuity, anyone can build a beetle in not much time at all.
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- it was all being controlled from a single board instead of seperate bits for each part.
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