Northern Allotment

Well, looks like Simon didn't want to paint over the carrot on K3's flipper arm, so we may have a new Northern outpost for Team Dangerous Vegetables and the Killercarrot Crew.

Simon will be running K3 with the T type axles powered by a pair of Littons at 24v from the standard Hawker SBS 15's and Curtis speedies. There's a new 160x100 10 bar ram to fill the hole left when I broke the 16 bar jobbie.. should make a nice little run around. I reckon it'll need a gyro as the 16" wheels made it a bit flighty when I ran it, but that could be my poor driving skills.

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Fake Plastic Trees...

So, for a bit of light relief I bought a few of Justin's LED Christmas tree kits. I think the original idea was to have a relatively easy kit to put together on Saturday workshops in the run up to Christmas, but they seem to have become quite popular with all manner of folk. Anyway, the kit is based around a couple of well made pcbs, a bag full of components, and the simple instruction that +ve is UP. It took about 10 mins to solder all the bits together, and with a huge amount of satisfaction over the end result. Justin and his Christmas tree kits can be found here: http://cyber-lane.com/ The Build Brighton Christmas workshops will be running each Saturday from 30th November to 21st December from 10am – 2pm. Entrance is completely free. Kits are priced between £2 and £5. #BuildBrighton can be found here: http://www.buildbrighton.com/blog/

The weakness of machines

All of the robots I have built have failed in fights, and usually at the axles/wheels, it's like a running joke. So why should it be any different with this featherweight? Meathammer was designed back in 2005/06 when using 4 drill motors was a bit of a novelty... it was made more novel still by mounting the epicyclic gear cages directly to the chassis, which unfortunately sends all the drive shocks back through the gearbox. The original version ran for a number of fights at modelworld 2006? and even won some, especially the sumo, which favoured its very low profile. I've just rebuilt the gearboxes with all metal gears, and tested it, and it seems it should last for at least one fight… but as I put it in the car after testing, I noted one of the wheels had nearly fallen off. Mark that bolt for Lockthreading! All this got me thinking if I could make something less likely to lose a wheel, break a gearbox etc I have a huge pile of bits and bobs that were destined for heavie...

Jansen Arduino

I bought two Gakken walker kits from ebay last Christmas, and finally got round to doing something with them. I disconnected the propellors, and the reduction gears and fixed the couplings to a couple of rotation hacked servos. I laser cut some servo mounts and hung them on some brass tubing to join the two sets together.

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