parallelogreg

For Motorama (2012) I designed and build a wedge battlebot named Parallelogreg. With the exception of my poor driving skills (I lost the first match in under 5s by driving straight into a wall and getting stuck) I think it worked fairly well for my first attempt, wining 2 of 4 matches.

Greg-front

Just the frame and the motors.

Re-order, flow is jumppy and illogical

I used two Black and Decker PD400LG PivotDriver Screwdrivers for the drive motors and gearboxes, with one stage of the planetary gearbox removed. An interesting side note is that there is an included piece that prevents back driving in these. I don’t know if that is standard in power screwdrivers or not, but I found the way it worked to be interesting.

[img] motor

My original idea was to build this guy on the cheap, which I why I chose the $12 screwdriver. As it turns out I got plenty of power and speed from these cheapo motor/gearbox combos, and some free emergency backup nightlights wit the leftover husks! Perhaps most apparent of my abandoning the “cheap” build is the 1/4 grade 5 Ti side plates, which I will discuss later.  First let me talk about the design.

[img] design drawings

A number of my friends/acquaintances had been active in battlebots for a while (Jamo link) and I ended up driving a spare battlebot that someone named Greg (octopart) had left in the local maker faire because we didn’t have many people competing. While the robot was named (cataclism?) it had been re-branded as greg-bot and served in a large part as the inspiration for my design, and why I built a battlebot.

[img] greg-bot

Another reason for the design choice of a wedge was that I wanted to stick with something simple for my first attempt. I had had the advantage of seeing what happens when people take on a project too large for their time constraints, and didn’t want to fall into that trap. (Hint, you end up destroying your robot the night before comp trying to rush yourself to finish it in time) In addition, the virtues of a robot that still works fine when flipped had become quite apparent.

[img] turtle on back

The sloped design of a parallelogram meant that it could easily deflect attacks, and that regardless of weather or not I was right side up I could chose to pursue my opponent with a forward or backward incline depending on my needs.

IMG_20121124_220207

Before I decided to go with 6mm sides I was going to slope the sides as well. Luckily I didn’t try to go with this because the corners would have been outside of my skill range.

intro

 

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