My Beetleweight Stuff

[tweedermeister]

Thought I may as well make a retroactive build diary for my beetle stuff since I'm now working on my 4th and haven't actually posted anything on here about them.

Hyperion:
Hyperion is based on the US bot Riptoff, it's the 2nd bot I ever fully designed myself but the first I built (that will be explained a little later)
As with all of my beetle stuff I started in Autodesk Inventor:


After some refining to remove a fair chunk of weight from the frame I ended up here:


Hyperions Internals:

It uses 2 1000rpm motors for drive, 2 BB10a's to control the drive, an NTM 28-36 to power the weapon and an Afro 30a to control the weapon. All of this is run off of a Turnigy 3s 850mah lipo.
Finished bot (minus lid):


Hyperions first event was the UK Beetleweight champs in December, after winning the first 2 fights by knockout, during the 3rd fight I tried to boxrush spinza to stop it spinning up, as I had a smaller dia and lighter weight weapon I spun up during the rush over and landed a small hit on spinza which unfortunately detached the pulley from the brushless motor and moved it into the path of the weapon causing the weapon to hit the pulley, snap the motor shaft off and throw the pulley at spinza in a futile attampt at a projectile attack. This left Hyperion as a rammer and seeing an opportunity I went to to put Incomplete Control into the pit but overshot it and drove both of us in giving Spinza the win.

Hyperions wedge is 2mm grade 5 titanium, the frame is 10mm thick 6082 ali with a 10mm thick 400g hardox disk spinning at 8k rpm.

Beetle Champs Videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkWcXa6iPaU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eE-Ub1vTGw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUyn...zMApE0ZkEXSDmA



Noxa:

Noxa was the first thing I ever designed in Autodesk Inventor, it started off with this horrible excuse for a CAD attempt:


After realizing how horrible this was and going through a few iterations I halted it and ended up designing/building Hyperion instead, once Hyperion was done however I decided to revisit it and ended up with this:


Then it was on to the build, Noxas frame is 10mm 6082 ali with a 50mm spinning dia 7075 drum. It uses the exact same Internals as Hyperion:


After making sure everything worked:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T333aD0jj9E
Paint and side armour needed to happen:






Final weight is 1.32kg (no idea how)

[tweedermeister]

And last but not least my next beetle, Ash 2:



Same internals as the other 2 beetles, wedge is 2mm grade 5 titanium, frame is 10mm 6082 with a 20mm thick hardox disk at 8k rpm. It will make its debut along with Noxa at Burgess Hill in may.

[daveimi]

really impressive

[Andy]

Really cool stuff, whats the armour on the drum made out of?

[tweedermeister]

Really cool stuff, whats the armour on the drum made out of?

The side armour is 4mm HDPE, cut as a single strip then heated and bent into shape.

[Andy]

Thats interesting, might give the heating a go, mines 2mm hdpe bent round without any heat so there is a lot of tension on the pieces

[tweedermeister]

Thats interesting, might give the heating a go, mines 2mm hdpe bent round without any heat so there is a lot of tension on the pieces

On Noxa it also helps how it's mounted, the strip is only mounted at the sides near the front with those bent brackets so has less flex in places that will take the hits better whereas at the back and around the wheels it can flex a lot more to take as much energy away from the hit as possible near the more fragile parts of the frame.

[tweedermeister]

With Reading done and the work week out of the way I can finally make a post event post.

Ash 2 was finished about a week prior to the event so with plenty of time to spare I packed it after testing the brushless drive and weapon. Little did I know however that the brushless drive would be the bane of my existence for the duration of the event (more on that later).

A couple of comparison pics of the cad to the actual bot:









Onto the event itself, weight being over the limit by 2g meant I had to remove 2 of the bolts holding the lid on to be compliant and allowed to compete, which was no big deal.

First fight was a Melee with Ion and Eclipse, immediately as the fight started one of my wheels stopped moving and I was left hobbling about the arena, then getting flipped by Ion and the same happening to Eclipse. I was to be counted out but thankfully Andy hit me again and I was able to right myself and Eclipse was counted out as I was still at least mobile enough to traverse the arena.

Turns out one of the pinions on my brushless drive had come loose, so as quickly as I could I removed the set araldite from it and the brushless motor shaft and reglued them allowing for as much time as possible before reassembling and fighting again.

2nd fight was against Ysabelle, the same problem started happening on the same wheel which was confusing, after a decent hit from Ysabelle flipped Ash and it self righted the wheel miraculously decided to work, without enough time to make a difference however and the decision was awarded to Ysabelle.

This put Ash into the losers bracket and into a 4 way rumble between Ash, Bourbon, Blackout and Fat Lip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RFhY1tNDL8

Thankfully in this fight my drive was working, what wasn't working however was the Fingertech wheels, they gave very little grip on the floor and made it difficult to get far enough under opponents for the weapon to take effect. This also caused Ash to drift a lot due to it being weighted towards the front because of the weapon.

I have since fixed the wheel grip issue by applying a layer of liquid latex to the Fingertech wheels which adds a massive amount of grip which should help a great deal in future fights.

That rumble went well giving Ash the win on a judges decision based on the damage done to Fat Lip, I would have been more aggressive but the combination of lack of grip and the wedge being fixed and ground scraping made it impossible to leave that tile of the arena floor without presenting the back of Ash to Fat Lip and exposing myself to an easy pitting.

After this fight I went on to fight Ysabelle again, this time with working drive. During this fight the wedge issue stemming from lack of grip persisted through most of it, although thankfully at one point I got enough of a runup to get under Ysabelle and get a decent hit sending the two bots apart. After this Ysabelle seemed to be having weapon issues so I gave it one more hit to flip it and start the countdown, there wasn't anough time left in the match to finish the countdown however and as the fight ended Ysabelle self righted.

Ash won that fight on a judges decision.

This put Ash through to fight Limpet in the Semi Finals, this was a fight I was greatly looking forward to after fighting Fat Lip and it going as well as it did. However the brushless drive decided that it didn't want to work again, this time one of the bullet connectors snapped off one of the motors before the fight rendering one side locked up and the other unable to move the whole bot because of lack of grip, so almost immediately as the fight started Ash was counted out.

This put Ash into a 3rd place playoff fight with Ion, a bot I was looking forward to fighting. The fight started with some weapon to weapon bumps but nothing spectacular, Ion then landed a hit on Ash's exposed side flipping it over, after self rightin one of Ash's wheels seemed to respond much later than the other so my mobility was impaired, however after some more weapon to weapon bumps Ion was immobilised due to the screws holding the wheels on coming loose after the hits. After the fight I took the wheel that was unresponsive to find the set screw holding it on had come loose but stayed on enough that the motor would still turn the wheel just on a bit of a delay.

This gave Ash 2 a 3rd place finish, my best in any formal competition yet:



Hopefully now the drive is sorted it should be a fierce opponent in the future.

I also put together a short highlights video from Ash's best fights over the course of the competition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq-pl2FpEr8

Thanks for Reading, Jack

[daveimi]

Something that has helped me on the advice of my old man, was to remove the Allen key set screws and put in a meaty bolt of the same thread. Could tighten it all up properly after that n it stop everything coming loose.

[Eventorizon]

I prescribe thread lock. There are many grades of thread lock so make sure you get something fairly light duty that can be broken by hand and doesn't require heating.

I am very impressed with Ash. Despite the drive issues it keeps on going and it doesn't want to die, unlike Ysabelle which dies whenever it gets hit :-P

[Zenith]

Always love your updates on Reddit - very nice to see everything lined up like this. Any ideas for the future?

[tweedermeister]

Always love your updates on Reddit - very nice to see everything lined up like this. Any ideas for the future?

I've got 2 more beetles to do, one of which is Phobos:


Still need to do the weapon motor mount but the rest is done:


Haven't done the design on the final one yet, but after Phobos I'm switching back to heavyweight stuff, got to get Tanto running and a few other heavyweight projects require my attention.

[tweedermeister]

Decided against building Phobos as another vert, so it got a slight redesign:



Has a 10mm aluminium frame with 2.2mm thick grade 5 titanium bulkheads housing an NTM 28-36 spinning a 400g disc at 12,000 rpm theoretical max.

Tried to take parts from the current well established beetle HS's that are around, the internals are the same as Newton apart from the weapon motor which is just a more powerful version, the frame style is the same as Spin Cycle, and the bulkheads are the same style as Zodiac/Soundwave.

[TornTech]

Looks nice!

How thick is your spinner? Whats it made out of?

[tweedermeister]

All of my discs are Hardox of varying thicknesses, Hyperion uses 8mm, Phobos will use 4mm, Ash 2 uses 20mm, and Tanto uses 25mm