Hi,

With the recent series of Battlebots I've rediscovered my love of robot combat and am looking at adding it to my (already far too extensive) list of hobbies. I've visited the USA regularly over the last 15y and the first couple of times I went I avidly watched Battlebots, Robot Wars and Robotica. I kinda forgot about it until I heard about the revival, but after watching it with my kids we're all hooked! And then I found out there was actually a bunch of people doing this in Australia.

I know there really isn't any activity in SA, but I was planning on slowly putting together a robot as a fun project with my eldest son. Initially I was going to make a beetleweight first then try making a featherweight sportsman that I could look at going interstate and competing with, but I've ended up with some motors and wheels that seem too heavy for the former so I've decided to just try making the bigger bot.

Steve

A featherweight sportsman is a good idea. You could potentially have an event without a full arena.

Do you know what sort of weapon you would like to have?
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So even the rain that falls isn't actually going to fill our dams and our river systems

Definitely going to be some sort of lifter, as: a) I'm going to be building it with a 7yo, so I don't want any sort of kinetic energy weapon; and b) I can test it without worrying about an arena or similar.

there is a few of us here in sa doing non kinetic matches in the ant weight class, (will be progressing to beetle soon as well).

I've got a box of random gearmotors, most 12 or 24 volt but many are missing info on voltage, gear ratios, RPM etc. So I've decided to start testing them using a sophisticated test rig (ie a $2.50 plastic container from Cheap as Chips) and custom built, precision engineered wheels (bodged together from chopping board and a non-slip mat).


The first motors I tested are geared a bit slow I think:
https://youtu.be/nYzg12UI0pU

These ones seem better: https://youtu.be/8UsJs5IUgjg

I had this week off work, and as a break from other projects I decided to start on a beetleweight bot, made from some random motors and chopping board.