Their story, in their words….
Our interest in battlebots were piqued by an American TV show called the ‘BattleBots”; we saw many people having fun experimenting with technology so we decided, when Mark Evison offered to fund projects like ours, to also try and do the same.
We first planned the circuitry of the bot with previous and newly gained knowledge, gained upon hours of research. We heard many new terminologies and were welcomed to the world of robotics and tech. Many parts were needed, such as wheels,servos, and different types of motors. During this challenge we were inevitability met with many obstacles that we overcame with determination and perseverance. A particular issue was the addition of the wheels. We bought our materials from different providers so they did not all connect with each other like Lego. To combat that we cut the casing of the wire and made sure they touched. Normally, a technique called soldering would be used to permanently connect the wires, but we did not have the equipment nor the money. So we opted to use duct tape which worked out well.
Another learning experience was when our receiver only had one plug-in input for channel 2. This was an issue because we had planned to attach a brushless motor and a servo to it which both required to be plugged in to channel 2, and they would both act as two different weapons. It would be possible to find another way but unfortunately, our brushless motor would not work and due to time concerns (for another one to arrive from online shops) we opted for the servo which we made our main and only weapon, the scoop.
Inspired by the Krave cereal box battlebot, our design is simple and uses household items such as the cardboard box the wheels came in to make the bulldozer like weapon. As we didn’t have any place to weld, we had to be creative.
Something we all found really enjoyable was the main building process. At times it was difficult and we felt stuck, but we overcame that because we were finally given the independence and responsibility to build something entirely on our own and that gave us the confidence to be able to push through and own our end product, allowing us to feel pride as we knew that it was our own hard work that made it.
Given this wonderful opportunity, we were able to reach our goal of building a battle bot, an opportunity that we thought would never come by, yet it did. On this journey we learnt more about each other, built upon our perseverance skills and learnt how to adapt to problems that faced us. We thank the Mark Evison Foundation for giving us this dream like opportunity.
