The last fleaweight I had fighting was Catatonia, which was quite ramshackle and never quite went in a straight line but was an awful lot of fun, especially in the rarefied environment of fleaweights where it inexplicably enjoyed quite a lot of success. That was a while back though, and I've been watching the fleaweight competitions at the last few World Series with quite some envy and decided the only cure for this was to build something new.
So, enter Zantetsuken. (Considering how much trouble people had with 'Arcus', I dread to think what joys await me here...)
I regretted grabbing the kevlar to use as a photo background about 0.4 of a femtosecond after taking this picture. my eyes...
Back in the day, Catatonia was a full competitive antweight drivetrain in a fleaweight body (a lot of its opponents were servo driven). With Zantetsuken, I'm hoping to scale down the armour I use in my full scale ants to similar effect - the sides are 5mm mystery plastic (the waterjet company aren't certain what it is, I'm guessing polypropylene), with the rest hopefully being a combination of aluminium/carbon fibre composite and 0.5mm grade 5 titanium. The drive for now is robbed from The Hurting(/Swakopmund's blessed vessel), with the wheels being some weird ones I got from Harry Hills that are basically belt pulleys. The wheels were actually the starting point for the whole robot; I do have form in that department...
The design and construction should be, and has been so far, quite simple; I'm not a great believer in CADing everything to make it fit (my training is in environmental science not engineering), so I only really use it in as much as I absolutely need to; in this case, to send my friendly local waterjet people a drawing for the sides. These will be drilled to 1.5mm, tapped for M2, and then the top and base bolted on with all the components mounted to the base. Total cost should be fairly minimal, recycled parts aside; so far I spent £20 total on the waterjetting and the bits to make up the special 2S 90mah battery packs (which weigh 6g, saving me all of 3g over the 120mah Hyperions I normally use!).
The CAD (top) compared to the finished pieces (bottom). The finished robot will barely be thicker than the motors at about 15mm.
Hopefully this will go together quite quickly (I need to get some aluminium sheet from the model shop first!) and maybe even be informative with all the newbies popping up; feel free to ask any and all questions
the lower weight classes always need more love too. The aim is to finish this for the next Fleaweight World Series, in between heavyweights and the dreaded day job!
