Patrick's Antweights

Hey guys,

A bit of a journey into the past before we get into what I’ve been working on recently as I found some old videos of my first ants from 2018

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My first real robot, it never got a name and got very little development before the next one, but it’s fun to look back.

Full size receiver, dual 10a red Chinesium ESC’s and some basic N20’s

After the success of pushing butter around, I’d seen a video of witch doctor, and I thought it was really interesting how the design elements were not only decorative but also functional, which led to this

Scorp, my first spinner robot and my first (and only) ant hammer saw to date. I’d really like to resurrect this soon, as I loved the look of it compared to a solid block with some weapons on it. It later got an axe conversion and then was gutted for parts earlier this year.

Sometime before this I made the firestorm model that was available with continuous rotation servos, which led to my trying to design a flipper. I have no real photos of this working, but the geometry was terrible for both flipping and driving as I’d tried to stuff a 37g servo into an already crowded chassis.

That’s all that I can find looking back, based on my photos I didn’t make any other ants between 2018 and 2023 which seems odd, but changing jobs and moving will do that I guess.

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Great design history :grin:

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The in-between times

I do a lot of STEM activities through work, and robots are always popular with kids and at events, which led to making some ant versions of my first featherweight, fortitude


(Hiding in the background here)

Its a great little robot, and accurately captures all of the problems the featherweight has with regards to it’s weapon while remaining old AWS (100mm³) compliant.

It’s around this time I also made “transvector”? It’s been a long time but the name seems about right. It’ll have its own post later on as it’s more of an ancestor of my current undercutter design.

Now finally having an antweight again, i started looking at local competitions for the first time in years and found SCAR, which being in Sheffield seemed pretty attractive as a first event.

I decided to enter a spinner, and with about 3 months until the competition it seemed like a reasonably achievable goal, so I ordered a large bar from monsoon and started designing

I wasn’t happy with either design, and so I kept going back and forth until it was a week before the event and I had to make something quick. “Friday Night Special” was made on a Friday evening, and was the result of desperately trying to shoehorn my new favorite paper-roller wheels into a Thagomiser-style build using a drone arm.

On the next Thursday morning I ended up with this

It didn’t drive inverted, my polycarbonate armour never showed up and it drove shockingly, so on my lunch break I designed it’s replacement, pretty heavily based on a generic ant found from thingiverse. It’s prone to wheelies but a lot of fun to drive on 3S.


Lunch break ended up competing at SCAR under Friday night specials name, and went 1-3 which earned me the best newcomer trophy, which I was over the moon with!

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Taking what I learned from lunch break, I decided to make a simple test bot to run as a reserve and let people drive if I manage to convince someone to come to an event.
I struggled with a a theme for a bit, and then found a mini RC forklift beacon which settled it for me.

Called PowerLoaner, it’s inspired by the loader from aliens, with some details from its design incorporated as features to aid In pushing. It uses the same double-wall construction as lunch break for a sacrificial front to defeat spinners. This was essential I felt after my performance at SCAR, but after printing a TPU version about a month later it feels a bit pointless now. The PLA versions also put a lot more shock into the motors, which if you run them for a long time has a habit of causing axle wobble and then premature death.
The TPU version also is far better at getting under opponents due to its compliant front end.
If anyone was at FightFest last year I had some of these running in the breaks for spectators to enjoy.
Link here if anyone wants to try it - PowerLoaner - 150g Antweight by Patrick Faulkner | Download free STL model | Printables.com

So now that all the history is out of the way, we can get to present day robot-ing

Way back when in the mess of work Antweights, I was trying to get a gear drive system to work for a flipper design, as with a dusty polycarbonate arena floor traction was pretty dire. Some sacrificed pololu wheels and we had this, which was immediately shelved as I wanted a spinner instead

Which led to Transvector, a my attempt then at making the thinnest bot I could, an undercutter TPU outer walls and CF lids. It kinda started to look like a frog so I ran with it, giving it a tongue shaped blade.

I Don’t have any photos sadly of it assembled, it lived it’s short life with a plastic spinner and has been stuffed in the bottom of my dead robot bin pretty much ever since. It did have a 2204 weapon motor if I recall, just to make it into the wheel height.

So about 9 months ago, I was inspired to make gear-drive a thing again, and to use my new fancy paper-takeup roller wheels to do it. They’re about 20mm in diameter, and offer unbelievable grip but are incredibly heavy compared to a normal wheel.

Took a while to set on a design as I couldn’t get a vert or overhead to work nicely, but then

Underhanded Tactics, my 2nd favorite robot I’ve made yet.
Pretty messy spaghetti wiring but it worked, and was fiercely non-invertible, but it worked, and worked well enough that it warranted a further development.

There’s been a few revisions, but I’d say we’re still at V1.3 rather than a true V2. Initial changes were to lose the wheel hoods as they were a faff to print, and didn’t add to anything other than adding biting points. Also fairly important to fix was the fact it didn’t drive inverted, initially I tried shifting the wheel position, but got stuck trying to work around the 20mm wheel diameter.
The biggest quality of life change was to fix my usual issue of lids containing components, as the drive motors were stuck in the lid, and the weapon motor in the top it made disassembling this a complete pain.
I ended up redrawing this a few times from scratch, and I feel like it lost a lot of it’s character every time I modified something, as I wanted to keep it low, slick and pretty close to the original silhouette.


V1.2 vs V1.4

The fix was eventually to just get over it and move to a bigger wheel. This timed nicely with Ellis launching his 30mm wheels, and after a few tweaks it was driving around the arena better than ever before.

There was actually an in-between version which has been lost to the fusion cloud somewhere, and the V1.4 is based on the changes made to the beetle version, moving the wheels to get better ground clearance, and curving the rear to expose even more of the blade behind the robot. More screws as well, to reduce the tin-opener effect It has on itself when it gets a big vertical hit to its blade, or at least to keep more of the lid on when it does.

The big change from 1.2 to 1.4 is moving from heat inserts and shoulder screws for the wheel axles to an M3 plastic screw and nylock. This saves a pretty decent amount of weight, and solves the problem I had with damaged wheels binding my drivetrain. Small hits are shrugged off by the foam tyres and TPU hub, and anything huge breaks the screw and rips it clean off, leaving me unencumbered. I’m currently trailing polycarbonate screws and RENY screws, and they’ve done fairly well so far. In the worst case, due to the gear location on V1.4 it can dive with no wheels left as the gears can touch the floor either way up.

Obligatory “don’t talk to me or my son ever again” with V1.3

The reason this I still class this as V1.4 and not V2 is despite the many body changes, the original wiring is still in use, with no replacements, and it’s pretty tired at around 30 fights. From the get go, I’ve been planning to move to a 3mm blade, and the more I run this robot, the more I’m sadly coming round to adding rear forks or a wedge configuration for that “just in case”. Plenty of grip and torque from the N10’s and wheels, but against a wedge I have no pushing surfaces to use.
I also need to reprogram the ESC, it’s still running a stock firmware OPTO, which is a little weedy and really hurts my spin up time, as well as a 1700KV 1806 which is limiting my top speed. I have the parts, but I’ve been waiting for it to finally die before I do a true rebuild. It sits at around 138g, so there’s plenty of room for a thicker blade and other bits.

This took a lot longer than expected but I hope it was at least interesting. Between my verts and pusher I’ve been going through N10’s faster than ever, and since switching to gear drive I’ve not had a failure.

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