Hello!
I’m thinking I should build an ant. It’s been a long time since my last one and I’ve had a few ideas.
To nobody’s surprise, I’ve been cooking up an antweight bop!, tentatively titled bip!.
I’ve also been mulling over this design for a little while, based on an old RA2 bot I made, which in turn was somewhere between ‘industrial machinery’ and ‘Panic Attack spiritual successor’, Aerator.
I dunno what I’m doing but at least it’s fun I guess?
I love Bip! I think that would look fantastic at Ant scale.
OKAY WELL THIS HAS BEEN A WHILE
we pick up about 925 years ago with the bip! as above
It’s kinda cool and fun but it’s huge and the hammer didn’t work properly, so it has lived on my desk ever since.
Cut to a lil while ago, the ant bug hit again after events at Wiper & True and knowing we’d be helping out at GRoCS in a few weeks time, lending them our arena. I decided to have another shot at ants which I typically find super fiddly and hard to design in my usual style. This would be a fairly heavily modified Eman thingiverse hammer, which I’d run in plastic ants.
I grabbed some fresh anty bits from @Joe, and @Liquid my hero printed a new shell. Check out that hot bambu ams action on the hammers!
Over the last week I’ve been putting it further together, more pretendos…
I realised the reason the original had a one piece top lid was to cover the wire channel (duh) which at least gave me the opportunity to showcase some good ol’ handbuilding, and sneaking in some polycarb for that true-to-the-beetle feel.
A little more assembly and we’re done!
And… a late decision to add some flair of course.
A last weigh in and we’re good to go!
See you at GRoCS!
Nice little robot! All that’s left is a featherweight called Bap!
Nah, honk! exists already 
Somehow even more adorable. If we get a couple more big/little beetle/ant combos it would make a great whiteboard fight.
Bip!'s Bip!ping was truly excellent, words cannot describe how many Bip!s a second it can do (trust me, I tried). Very smol compared to anything really. There’s a reason it goes Bip!, not Bop! and Honk!
OKAY IT’S BEEN A WHILE AGAIN
I recently found myself surprisingly invested in designing and building a new antweight. Much of this was driven by the desire to become more familiar with designing effectively for 3d printed chassis, which I’m hoping I can translate to beetles further down the line.
I decided to revisit the guy in the first post as I’ve been kind of missing running lifters/flippers, and this design has always been sat in the back of my head. The design came together across 2 quiet days at work, and one little name adjustment later, anxious exists! Massive credit to @Jordan - making SVRN open source really helped me visualise some design choices with the body and side pods, thank you so much! Similar thanks to @Jack for being a constantly patient sounding board.
After some hasty printing and assembly here’s how it ended up, ready for our ant event last weekend. Internals are a super old beta malenki, a similarly super old nanotech 2s 120mah lipo, some 600rpm n10s with the BBB 22mm wheels and a BBB high speed servo.
Visually? One of my favourite things I’ve ever built. It just hits the brief, yaknow? In performance? Much to be desired. I’ll be redesigning it to have a better hinge, better linkage, more protection from horizontals (one hit from a sit n spin on the side of the arm took out the servo horn, siiiick) and also 1000rpm n10s as the 600rpms feel super sluggish. For the mean time, it looks p nice on a shelf 
Really cool build and name,
Big fan of what you’ve put together with this one, definitely one of the best looking Ants I’ve seen!
Version 1 left a lot to be desired, the flipper geometry was awful, so despite having no event to take it to for the foreseeable, I thought I’d work on a version 2 while I had the motivation. It’s much better now! Bonus, with the redesigned side pods, the flipper is now much less susceptible to horizontal hits, which was a problem last time.
