2003 Build Diary

During the construction of Bobblebot in 2003 - 2004 I maintained a build diary, detailing the progress made and problems encountered.

Again, these are pretty much the exact notes I wrote in 2003 with only minor edits and as such the spelling and grammar is likely to be consistent with that of a 13 year old!

02/11/03

Today we started to build Bobblebot and it went quite well. I found some thin and narrow lego wheels and we screwed them to the base however the the screws were too long so we used a bit of card as a washer and now they are on very tight. From the same bit of card I cut two 8*8 pieces and stuck them together to make the chassis.It is now virtually unbendable. Also did a quick weight check on the chassis and it comes in at around 15g! Also we put some markings on the chassis to see if it would all fit into the 4" cube and despite being very tight it does just about fit.

7/11/03

We stuck the wheels on to the piece of card and plugged the two SD200 servos into the receiver and....it worked! I adjusted it slightly to stop the creep and then drove it around my table and apart from it nearly pushing a small tin of sweets all over the floor it went well. The only small problem I have is that the transmitter I have is not "tank style" so driving it is a bit difficult.

17/2/04

Well all this time later and we still haven't finished it! but we did do some work on it today and pictures will follow shortly. We decided to fit the on/off switch today as then it could be classed as a fully working ant. We were originally going to put the switch on top of one of the drive servos or round the back. We then discovered that you could take 2 little screws and screw it through the chassis/base. As this sounded like the easiest option and it would allow more room on top for a crusher this is what we did. We had to cut a little piece of 1mm card out to raise the switch up a bit otherwise it would of lifted the wheels off the floor!. This was easily sorted though and we tested it all out and it works fine.

??/9/04

Finally done some more work! We fitted some new tires to day made up of a washing up glove. We had to get around the problem of it lifting its own wheels of the floor as they went round and the gloves provide about clearance more ground clearance and weigh about 2 grams for both of them! We also cut out a prototype crusher and got some sticky pads and stuck the crushing servo on. We also had a think about how to activate and operate the crusher and have come up with a system that is a bit complicated, and I will try to get some diagrams online as soon as possible.