RobotWars101

I suppose I was just lucky. My DasMikro seems to be holding up ok so far.

Ikea's range of polypropylene place mats, e.g. http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/products/summer/seasonal-textiles/sommar-2018-place-mat-multicolour-art-50387853/ NB: These are discontinued often, but replaced by similar ones just with a different pattern. It's pretty thin polypropylene (< 0.5mm) with a sli...

You can also bend PC quite easily at room temperature or with moderate heat (I think). I am currently trying with 1mm polystyrene (the non-expanded variety) which seems quite amenable to bending with a carefully constructed (timber) jig and hot air gun. I also use 2mm bolts and nuts, they are fiddly...

Thanks for that link. It just seems that an Arduino or raspberry pi board has far more functionality than is actually needed to link an RC Rx to an H bridge just to control 2 motors, so costs too much in terms of space and weight. Absolutely correct! Yes it does too much, to bridge an RC RX to H-Br...

You need to use a micro controller such as an Arduino or raspberry PI to act as the speed controller. I don't need to. I want to. That's different :) It's because I'm trying to do something more interesting with the IMU. If I can find a board which has all the bits I want (suitable IMU, radio and m...

That H-bridge looks very tidy.I like the extreme low profile and that it's official rated to work with 3v3 logic levels. also benefits from actual holes in the PCB, unlike the Dasmikro which is compact but fiddly.

I could use one of those for weapon control.

Join your local Hackspace, Reading Hackspace has a lot of people who can help with that kind of thing. We can weld aluminium (I'm told - never tried) and have a couple of CNC machines which can machine alu, as well as the more conventional power and hand tools.

I found that my cheap home meter behaves somewhat like a random number generator, my guess is that it's putting AC or some switched voltage through. The good meter (pictured) is in Reading Hackspace and consistently gives 11-12 Ohm for the good motors. It also depends slightly on the shaft position,...

Hi, this is a general warning.

I ordered a total of 6 motors from China, 5 of them are working normally.

If you measure the resistance with a good quality meter, 12 Ohm is normal. This one is showing a short circuit.

*do* measure the resistance of every motor before wiring it up

Not all good news, had a frustrating morning trying to diagnose a short circuit. Discovered that one of the Chinese N20 gear motors had a dead-short circuit internally despite appearing normal otherwise. My advice for anyone wiring up a robot with several motors in parallel on a ESC is: * Check the ...