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!
