I am trying to source parts for my 10yo son’s first ant weight combat robot. We are going to build this robot together and we would like to try this one by Ben from Team Panic because the video is fantastic and we think we can manage it (fingers crossed): Tutorial: the easiest spinner combat robot - YouTube
I would like to try to find the parts locally if I can. I tried to find them on your website but I found that quite confusing and when I spoke to Trent, he recommended that I post on this forum.
So my question is: do you have these parts?
DC Micro Metal Gear Motor w/Driver - 50:1 (we will need two)
Flysky receiver fs2a 4ch
Flysky transmitter FS-i6
12A brushless ESC
1806 brushless motor
180mah 2s Lipo battery
Jst plug
M2 screws
We also need a drone arm, but Trent mentioned that I might need to look for that elsewhere.
That tutorial video is a great guide but I’d recommend starting out with a robot without a spinning weapon unless you have a test box or arena that it’s safe to use it in.
Antweight robots usual compete in arenas featuring a pit so a pusher robot is no less competitive, in fact, statistically wedgebots win more than spinners.
Maker’s Muse just posted this tutorial which shows start to finish how to build a 3d printed antweight pushbot, it’s very similar to the Team Panic tutorial, just simpler. Even if you still want to build the spinner this is definitely worth a watch as it doesn’t hurt to have something explained again in different words.
The drive motors you were after can be found here.
Core also sells them without the built-in driver board in case you had a driver board like in the Maker’s Muse video.
I’ve got a half-finished robot that uses a Malenki-Nano board, they cost a lot more but it means the receiver, and three motor drivers are all built into one board. Here’s a photo of my work-in-progress bot.
I really appreciate your safety advice. I hadn’t heard of a test box, but now that I’ve seen a video on making one, that will most certainly be made before a robot with a spinner. Thankfully, my husband can lead that project :).
I just watched the Maker’s Muse video that you suggested. It was, indeed, very informative. I’m fairly certain my son will still want to make the spinner, but he’ll learn a lot from it.
Your robot looks awesome! I’d imagine that we’ll need to get pretty proficient at soldering to be able to do what you have done on something so tiny. That’s another new skill for us. We’re on a very steep learning curve at the moment .
Soldering can be tricky to learn at first but it’s incredibly useful and opens up a lot of options for hobby projects. We have a guide on learning to solder I’ll link below, the general rule is you want your joints to look like mini-volcanos and like any skill the more you practice the better you will get.
I’m not sure what video you found on test boxes but the one I’ve linked below is quite comprehensive and is made by a Battlebots competitor who posts a tonne of educational videos to help people get into the sport.
If you are ever going to compete at an event you can only have batteries in a bot with a spinning weapon when it is inside a test box or safe arena, so it’s a standard that should be upheld in the home as well as it’s not worth the safety risk otherwise.
Since you’re following a build guide it won’t be strictly necessary, but if you wanted to understand more of the process about how to select parts the apptly titled How to NOT Blow Up Your Robot video covers how to choose parts and what order you select parts in.
Tip (for what its worth)
Start out with some decent tools, especially the soldering stuff.
Put “soldering” in your browser and there are some videos etc. Look before you get into too much trouble and before you make any purchase decisions.
Cheers Bob
Thank you very much, Trent! The soldering information is very helpful. This is a whole new skill for us, so we are really enjoying the journey, but we do find that there is so much information out there that it can be very overwhelming when you just want the basics as a beginner.
The test box information is also very useful. As you said, he has some other very helpful video’s, too. We’re working our way through them now :).
We are very interested in learning more about the parts, so the suggestion of the parts video is very useful. At the moment, we don’t know much, and I’d imagine that as we get more experienced, there will be a bigger desire to try to choose everything ourselves. We are absolutely not there yet .
Thanks, Bob :). That sounds like very solid advice. There seems to be a huge range out there with a very different price range, but it seems that when we watch ‘how to build’ videos, the same ones come up very regularly, so we have decided to go for one of the more expensive ones which seems to get good reviews.
Hi Fiona.
Good thinking, personally I don’t think anyone should skimp on this sort of thing. 9 times out of 10 one will get frustrated with performance and quality of the end job so in my opinion decent tools are a good start. As far as soldering irons go I did (still have it) use a “Goot” temperature controlled unit but it was getting long in the tooth and the range of tips very limited although I did find that Hakko tips worked well. I recently upgraded to a Hakko FX888D which seems to be very popular, is well supported and has a good range of tips readily available. So far has been good. Weller is also a well known brand but there are a few others out there all with their pros and cons. Temperature control is a must.
Goodhunting
Cheers Bob
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