Design

I'm building this robot out of an old printer that was laying around. It is nothing like your normal printer cause, well, its HUGE! The dimensions of this beast of a printer case are W-26.7", L-24", H-10.7". Picking up the printer proved qutie a task...EMPTY. It seems the bottom half is made out of steel I'd assume considering its weight. The printer case is also very sturdy as I have proven by standing on the top half(which opens), I weigh around 180 lbs, 175 on average. I will attempt to weld an internal chassis to put into the casing as support and a place to mount everything on. Lets just hope arc welding will come natural to me.

I was thinking of using the case's brute build but I thought that was kinda boring, plus I didn't think I could obtain the proper motors to be a brute force robot. So I had to come up with a weapon that I could put together and if possible, have it dual purpose if it decides to malfunction. So I threw around some ideas and thought the idea of flipping someone up in the air would be nice and would be a crowd pleaser. Since I didn't wanna imitate Vlad The Impaler in its lifter/flipper design I thought of a plow. I haven't seen a bunch of plows that functioned so I had me a weapon. This is only my first plan that I am thinking of using, this may change. I drew up how I would like it to look and went into trueSpace 4 and made a basic copy of the printer case, then I added a plow and animated it and a sample pivot point. I rendered it for real time viewing here.

For the plow weapon, I have two basic choices for putting it into action. I can either use a powerful motor with a chain drive to rotate an assembly attacthed to the arm, or I could use pneumatics/hydralics. At the moment I'm leaning towards pneumatics in the form of CO2. It is quite fast at moving something from point A to B and I need to learn something about pneumatic systems anyway. I also have read that CO2 in liquid form has a great capacity than standard compressed air and it would proably last longer than a motor that is running along side the drive system motor current draw. It also simplifies the amount of high current electrics required.

I went down to a local surplus store to see if they had motors. This is a picture of one of the 36v Servo motors I picked up for $10 each. I also picked up a rather large UPS battery but it'll be for testing. I may run these at 36v if I have the room(and the batteries), but they turn pretty good at 24v. The draw about 20amps a piece when stalled(I think thats how I read my multimeter), so they aren't no Bosch 750Ws(anyone wanna donate me some?:) ). To keep cost down, I plan to build my own.

Decided that I may want more than one weapon so I'm going to attempt to design in a rear attack axe/hammer for anyone that attacks from the rear or if I happen to be facing in that direction.