10/4/2025 - Started the cad and go a basic design setup

I started off with doing some research on what motors I was going to do for the drive of this robot, in previous versions I've done a type of drive called Alex drive which is a complicated drive with a mix of gears and belts, for this version I am doing a complete remake and I spent an hour or so talking with different providers about gearboxes and I think I am going to figure out how to mount the brushless motor to a gearbox from a brushes motor. I'm waiting on providers to reply back as of now. As for the CAD side of things I chose my electronics and made a weapon

The drive motors will look something like this

10/5/2025 - Created a custom planetary gearbox

Today I spent some more time messaging people on AliExpress and Alibaba asking them about different gearbox's, but none have the information I needed, so I gave up on that and I spent a few hours messing with gear ratios and ended up making a fully custom 3d printed planetary gearbox that I'm printing out tonight to test. Other than that I didn't really do anything on it today

10/7/2025 7 AM - Messes around with the gearbox and continued cadding

So the gearbox didn't work great so far I'm on my third or fourth version of it with the first issue being I couldn't get the parts in, then the second being the plastic nubs I had to mount gears to not having enough strength which I fixed by making those m2 screws then I have an issue with it being too tight, currently I am waiting for it to finish 3d printing again so I can test it. As for the cad side of things I am thinking that the gearbox may not be strong enough so I might have to switch to repeat robotics mk4's or a similar brushless drive motor.

10/7/2025 9 PM - Created the upright and had a relization

So today i got the gear boxes working and was testing them before i relized the shaft wouldent be able to take nearly enough torque because i was spinning the whole gearbox from said shaft and the shfat just bent off on three different pieces even with a screw centraly supporting it. So then i reseached different drive motors and decided on the repeat robotics mk4s beofre i them learned the 4mm version is out of stock everywhere. So now im going to use a 3lb robot drive motor called the repeat compacts which use 1806 motor which is slightly bigger then my custom gearbox motor and a lot lot stronger. Today i also designed the uprights but i think im going to have to change things up with the new bigger motor. This is the difference between a mk4 and a compact with the mk4 being on the right

here is the upright i designed too it needs a bit of work

10/10/2025 - Fleshed out the robot and messed with the wheels

I started this yesterday but i forgot to add a log, so today i fleshed out the robot by adding a bunch of things and starting to do weight calculations to see if it will be underweight, first i got proper wheels imported, then i started making things look good and be stronger by adding a bunch if filets and overall making it look smoother. its going to be really close with the weight but i think it might be underweight with the 3lb drive motors



This is my weight without armor so i might be cooked

10/14/2025 - Today I finished the robot!!!

Today I finished the robot!!! today I started with remaking the uprights a little bit to make them smaller and make it possible to drive upside down, then i had to remake the top lid too. after that i finally got the design down for the armor after a few revisions. after all of that I did weight calcs with it being solid and was stupidly overweight thankfully i dont need everything to be solid so when i was messing with print settings i was able to get it underweight. here is a side profile
here is a front view
And here's a top view
heres my weight calcs, ill add links to populate the bom soon

11/20/2025 - Redesigned the Robot

Since the last update I competed with this robot at a competition, and it got 4th place!
The main issues with the robot were 1. the "Ground game" sucked, which means the forks went fully touching the ground and it let other robots get under it easier. 2. The weapon was 8mm off the ground which allowed other robots to get under me much easier because their forks did get caught under my weapon and instead just made me lift up. In the newest version of the robot, I had to fix all those issues and reinforce things that I found out were going to cause more problems. The robot was previously running on a 3s lipo battery and I was able to make it run on a 4s by reducing the weapon diameter, the speed of the weapon still increases because of the higher battery voltage. I also had to change how the bearing was put into the weapon after melting 4 different weapons because of friction, I switched to a flanged bearing. This robot is going to be competing again with all of its upgrades on the 22nd.

1/11/2026 - Put the robot together

I put the robot together, that involved soldering, printing all the parts, programming escs, and putting it all together. The hardest part of this was getting the escs programming to work properly because if you changed one setting it wouldn't work then change another and it would go too fast.

here is a picture of it when I finished everything, don't mind the messy workspace

2/26/2026 - Put three clones together

I had a big competition coming up, so I built three exact copies of my bot for backups, electronics, and all. For the event, I redesigned the robot somewhat again. One of the issues I was having was that everything felt too weak, so I switched to a smaller 2207.5 brushless motor that I found on amazon and it's only about 2 dollars more expensive than my old ones for close to the same power but weighing way less. I also switched to custom cast wheels using Vytaflex to save more weight. For the weapon i made the tooth larger and removed some area from the inner wall to save on more weight. I also switched out my battery to be one of the same capacity but weighing less somehow... it works somehow. Doing all the upgrades on the bot in cad only took about a hour and a half but building all the bots took a while I built them over the span of a week and in total i think it took me around 18 ish hours because i had to solder it all program the escs update them make sure everything spun right fix any shorts just all kinds of things but in the end i got 5th place out of 32 bots at the event and i got to do a cool photo shoot. During the event, I ended up fighting one of the toughest bots at the event and won. I think the hardest part was soldering everything and hoping nothing had a short. For the wiring, everything is based around the ESC. The power from the XT30 connector goes to the power switch and the esc. The motors all connect to the different channels of the ESC, and the receiver is connected through a voltage reducer and the signal wires.

After printing some tests and asking some friends i figured out the best print settings. For the weapon, I use about 2 walls and 1000 top and bottom layers. For the uprights, I do 6 walls and 1000 top and bottom layers. For the body, armor, wheels, and forks i use 2 walls and 25% gyroid infill. The printer I use is a x1c with a 0.8mm nozzle