what is the best way to make a 1lb battlebot arena for cheap?
What does “cheap” mean to you?
Regardless, I think most of us would consider the cost of polycarbonate pretty prohibitive to building an arena. The easiest thing you can do is run sportsman robots only and ban anything really dangerous like spinners, metal forks, pneumatics etc. Then your arena can be as simple as a wooden frame on the ground, just tall enough to stop people getting a speeding robot to the knee (see Robo Hockey arenas and FIRST robotics play areas for inspiration).
I’m doing this currently for a 150g antweight arena - I have lots of used 4mm polycarbonate which I don’t trust enough to run with spinners (I don’t know what it was exposed to before I found it in a skip; temperature extremes, cleaning chemicals etc will make it fragile), but it’s more than enough to allow small kids to safely see into a tabletop antweight arena.
If you desperately want to run spinners, it’s time to go begging local plastic suppliers for sponsorship.
Hi welcome to the forum.
We’re based in the UK here so we don’t really fight 1lbers - best to join some american forums / discords etc to get more suitable advice!
If you’re asking about 1lbers it’s probably likely as Joe says you’re in America. In which case, you should be taking inspiration from the North American SPARC arena construction best practices - https://sparc.tools/SPARC_Arena_Construction_Best_Practices_v1.1.pdf
Their minimum estimate for a safe box is $3000. Worth chatting to more of the guys that build arenas/run events for that weightclass than in this space I’m afraid.
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Thanks for the help!