I haven’t really shown off any of my robots, so I figured I’d just show one of them quickly.I built this for an event that’s a part of a school-wide Science Olympiads competition. Multiple schools participate. Since I’m the only real hardcore technology person in my school (there are computer enthusiasts, but none that I know of can program very well, and none of them have built something like this), obviously I get all the complicated work, and nobody else helps, heh. Such is life I suppose, although I’m hoping in college I meet some more people who share an interest.
Here’s the one from last year, “The Nex”. I named it after the weapon from the game Nexuiz, and borrowed the Nexuiz logo for it, since I literally finished this hours before the competition, and couldn’t come up with an original name.
You can see the internals better here:
Just a 7.2 volt battery, two speed controllers, two rather large motors, and a futaba radio system (missing from the picture because I’m reusing it in this year’s robot). I used worm gears to build this, but the problem was that the gears kept slipping, despite my efforts to prevent this from happening. Despite the fact that it barely worked, and that it was just a box that was made from glued together Plexiglas, it did surprisingly well, ranking 8th out of 52 teams at the Science Olympiads event.
I’ll write another post on this year’s robot after the competition. It’s definitely an improvement over last year’s model, and almost completely rebuilt too.