After competing in a few antweight events, I really caught the bug for something bigger. Since my 8-year-old comes with me to all of these events, I had the fun task of building two robots instead of one—can’t let him have all the fun!
My original plan started after seeing these guys on an NHRL TikTok:
I thought I could change it up by adding some BBB brushed motors and building a two-robot cluster.
so i built this guy
Weighing in at 500g, this left me with 1kg for its sister bot. I wanted to keep it simple, so I decided to create a larger version of my antweight robot, SOAP. I wanted it to retain the modular front end, as that would come in handy depending on the opponents I’d face.
After some work in Fusion, I printed off V1. With help from many questions on the DOJO Discord, I ended up with this:
It wasn’t perfect—the belt was a bit too long, and the first set of wheels didn’t turn out well due to too much Vaseline in the moulds, which deformed the wheels in places.
I had to run HTD5 belts due to their length and local availability. They were massively overkill but did the job. The front wheels run on M6 shoulder bolts and oilite bearings, secured into a captive nut in the chassis.
Everything was going well until I checked the weight:
This was without top plates, armor, forks, etc., so I decided to scrap the smaller bot idea and make this into a single, full-weight beetle.
Here’s Version 2. I remade the body with dovetails in the front to mount the changeable front end, improved the wheels (much better this time!), and, after a tip from a fellow builder, I made a jig to split the 9mm-wide belts in half, making them much more manageable.
This was followed by my laser-cutting order to finish it off:
