Battle Antz

[PBx]

Thermoform? you can cold fold polycarbonate

True enough (that's what I do now), the parts it feels like it would be nice to do have folds close together. Cold folding needs to go well over 90 to end up with a right angle and I find it fouls on the vice I use. I would also like to fold in 2 dimensions or round a curve, both of which are pretty impossible using a cold fold.

[josh]

If you make a male and female wooden mould You should be able to heat the material in a water bath and lay it between the moulds and press the moulds together. I have used a heat moulding machine like this at school but this was with polystyrene sheet (not blown polystyrene, it's the stuff they make blister packaging out of)

[PBx]

It needs to get rather hotter than that, but as I have access to a small pottery set up I hope to be able to manage

[knightrous]

The Australian roboteers seem to be way ahead of us on this front - even if they're slipping behind regarding cricket! - Aaron was telling me about some Hobbyking 'kits' they set up and then ran a few workshops to educate people on what the parts did and left the chassis, armour, weapon construction etc. to them, and going on threads about it (which I can't seem to find atm) it worked really well
If we could do something like that for people interested in robots but unsure of how to build one, it would be far more beneficial than just selling the kits I think.

Here is the latest tutorial from the QRSC site
http://www.qrsc.crystalnode.net/kitbot/ ... 202010.pdf

The first initial kitbots had lipols, be we decided to step down to simple rechargeable AAA's and allow a bit more weight (although most were pretty close to the 150g limit with AAA's) as to reduce the cost of a dedicated lipol charger. and the fact that most people know how to use AAA batteries, but are clueless on LiPol.

[Simon Windisch]

What a great resource knightrous

I had a chance to have a very close look at a Battle Ant today. My thoughts, positive first:
- Very well made polycarbonate shell, strong enough for pretty much any impact
- Similarly well machined HDPE (I assume) bottom and back plates, and I like the way that the back plate has holes that exactly match the servo mounts
- Good choice of servos (if servos it has to be) Ripmax S3003 (I think) heavy duty and hardy
- Good use of velcro and sticky pads to fit components
- Good use of Planet T5 RC, very reliable
On the negative side:
- One of the drive servos' potentiometer was so off-centre that it couldn't be trim adjusted
- The chassis flexes when the flipper servo operates, reducing the effectiveness of the flipper significantly. This could be fixed quite easily by fixing the servos to the back wall
- The flipper linkage on the model I looked at wasn't properly aligned - and this and the previous point meant that it didn't have enough energy to self-right (I don't know if this is a kit, in which case it's not the fault of the design).
- It's just too big, not a good use of space, it's basically a miniature Battle Rat, not an easy-antweight, and the techniques that we use to cram everything in have not been used in this design.
- Out of my sample size of four users, three have been over their heads with regards to understanding what they've got and how to use them, I think it somehow is too complex a product for what these people want, and I don't think they're very happy with them.

So once again respect to John for doing this, and I think it's doing the antweight community good. Let's see how a future version two might address these issues.

[Simon Windisch]

A response from John

always good to read constructive criticism, especially from a respected member who knows a lot more about ants than we do.
[...] we are currently working on the next version as we are sending 100 over to singapore soon. We are addressing quite a few if the issues raised as we know about them, and some other improvements to reduce to manufacture time. Glad to have you along. Can you sort of copy this to your forum, don't think I'm a member.

[haz]

the acrylic ones are terible though, the back plate often snaps and the flipper can't flip things

[MicroGravity100]

I own one of these Battle Antz, and I can say that although they are a nice thing to own, the weight and size advantage are payed back with these weaknesses:
The flipper struggles to lift 150g of Antweight. My ant can lift it no problem!
The drive is fast, but because the wheels have no grip, it just ends up sliding all over the place, and normally into the pit!
The rear and base armour is thick, but very brittle and breaks easily (mine has aluminium plates to hold it together - thanks haz)

Battle Antz are balanced out with advantages and disadvantages. I have built an Antweight version of these kits, and it works better than the bigger kit does!