Corvis (temp bot name) rough ideas.

[psychostorm]

No point trying to make a walker. Even if you manage to turn up with a walker that survives a spinner, the spinner owners will just ban it.

[typhoon_driver]

What's that supposed to mean Ceri?

[ewan]

A degree of freedom needs to be independent of another - if you have two degrees of freedom from a leg it should be able to move up and down and forward and back independently, not in a combined motion such that cams produce. Think about the way the leg moves on scuttlebot or other shufflers, it is passing through a fixed trajectory of which only speed and direction are controlled, you need to add more variation than this.

I personally think shufflers ought to get a minimal weight bonus, say 125%, to encourage creativity.

[Bacon Wizard]

k, my initial thoughts for a design apply, then. That's nice

[Eventorizon]

With good reason it's difficult to make a walker in my eyes. That mechanism in a featherweight FBS of the sort like little spinner would be devastating as you could in theory have a machine with a 13kg disc on a brushless motor.

That was basically my idea, I have the designs for it and everything, parts spec'd, costed up but its around 3 thousand with no mess ups. Its also why my machine isn't called Eventorizon. I am saving it for that!

Besides I cant see any team with a spinner wanting to ban walkers. They might get defeated a few times but they will come back until that one time they can pull the legs off one by one like a spider :-) I would even if I had to loose 10 times to do it. It would be so worth it!

This walkers thing needs to move to a new thread, or resurrect the old one. As for this build, start at the bottom and work up. It may not be what you want but you wont waste a load of money and time like I did.

[psychostorm]

What's that supposed to mean Ceri?

Not inferring you Gary. You'd fight anything.

Every time someone mentions the walkers weight advantage there's normally a legion of spinner owners making huge arguments on why it shouldn't have the weight advantage for the event they May put it into a spinner. Don't think something actually qualifying for the champs will stop it.

& then there was the Robochallenge proposal to make it easier for spinners at the AGM.

Then the discussion about raising arena walls comes from a spinner owner & gets shot down by flippers.
Then someone else argues about the pit. Or the colour of the LED. Or anything.

Politics. I'm sick of it all to be Frank. I want to turn up, have fun & walk away with something I can fix cheaply & with the contents of my toolkit.

[Bacon Wizard]

I'm probably not going to comment after this post because I have no experience to draw-upon nor to give my POV any credence, plus I'd like to get this thread back to the friendly advice of people helping me with my first build and somewhat lofty ideas.

But clearly if the weight allowance for walkers were such a huge advantage there would be lots OF them, rather than precisely none whatsoever. Case closed I reckon.

[harry hills]

Hiya,
At the end of the day, its up to you what you build, and I personally would love to see some incredible fighting walking machine around today but i would say that getting a box on wheels going is a very good idea, if nothing else it will show you how to set up radio gear, escs batteries for robot use. I would try and basically build anarchy, if you think carefully about weight from the beginning, and use lipos etc you should just about have enough weight to properly amour the thing in 13.6kg.
My thoughts anyway. Cheers.

[Bacon Wizard]

Yeah, it's advice I am seeing repeated and I'm gonna follow it. Not to build anarchy especially, but to start with a wheeeled box for FW while other things happen. This bot, the eventual walker is still a project though, it's one that will probably take a year or two.

[Bacon Wizard]

OWCH!!! I've just seen the cost of fast-switching solenoid valves! I may have to design a kind of timed distributor instead Christ, walkers earn their weight!

[daveimi]

Lol I want to build a huge mechanical snake!

http://www.snakerobots.com/S7.html

[Bacon Wizard]

And what exactly do you plan to do with that?

Frighten the girls away, ye will.

Here are some festo air-muscles in opposition to each other. Even a home-made muscle of that size can lift over 60k. These are rated to 6bar and are being pushed to new speeds (normally top speed is 100hz, or 50hz for home-made)

Festo ones are very expensive, but it's entirely possible to home-make air-muscles with decent performance quite cheaply and using kevlar braid instead of nylon which most use.

http://youtu.be/j71vV1xq9jU

I highly recommend a search of "festo" on youtube, they've done some amazing vehicles and robots.

[james...venom]

Sounds like a great robot design, would love to see it going! If you have the technical ability then definitely go for it. Do Not Make A Brick!

[Bacon Wizard]

Thanks for the encouraging words! And nice to see you on the boards. Been a busy have we?

It is the story of my life that I know a bit about the weird and wonderful, cutting-edge stuff, but am a complete novice at the basic stuff that is the real foundations of it all. So lots of learning to be done.

And there was never any chance of this turning out as a brick!

[Ellis]

I'd say both ends of the opinions here are right. You will benefit hugely from building something simple and putting it in the ring to understand the physics involved. The bent m20 bolt that was mentioned was on the front of our robot. We're still learning by the millisecond, a year down the line and barely beyond our second robot. The other thing that matters, though, is to not discourage. Don't think the only way in this hobby is to build like the masses. Without people with wacky ideas we wouldn't have our hobby at all.

With that said, please go and build something weird and wonderful. If you're prepared to learn from it if it goes wrong then everything is to gain.