Electronic Gadgets For The Evil Genius

[robotland]

I want to play Rock-'em, Sock 'em Robots with a pair of Asimo-model 'bots, myself....

Or combine Battlebots with the DARPA challenge....Autonomous robot free-for-all in a gravel pit or quarry, with no weapons disallowed. I know folks that'd pay good money to be allowed to participate, and just imagine what benefits the military would reap. Plus it'd make good TV.

[Mozy bonz]

Earth's magnetic field lost 10% of it's strength

2050:Finally pissed enough to act, the earth produces antibodies to the
human race.

ahhhahhhhh.......... I forgot how much I love the smell of ozone ..
I pulled out the tesla coil.............. only 250kv but fun.

shit...... burned the capacitor.

I love to build a battle-bot
thats really cool.

I have a 14 year old son, and I would like to do somthing like that with him.

[can't sit still]

Your board name kinda gives away your interests. You've had plenty of time to think about it. What would your main weapon be if you had a 3,000 lb battle-bot without weapons limitations?
You have to rely on stored energy to get much effect. I think I'd go with propane. You could have a peripheral ring of flamethrowers. Shoot liquid bursts to get good range. Of course, if someone shows up with 50 cal spent uranium sabot rounds, you would be toast.
The whole thing sounds expensive.

[robotland]

Hmmm...A battlebot with an onboard coil, with which to fry the opponent's systems, would be unique...

I've found that regular patrol of the curbside trash pickups yields a surprising quantity of robot parts, especially the FANTASTIC little motor-and-gearbox units from Powerwheels cars. I've got a small pile of 'em, and have already made an EXTREMELY pathetic (but cheap!) homemade Segway...Next is an electric bicycle-assist.
Usually the batteries are gone by the time they hit the curb, or they're toast, but those drive units have LOTS of torque and are readily adaptable. Breaks my heart, to think how many are in landfills.

[geekster]

I am actually working on something I want to build for 2006 and have bought several books on robotics recently, managed to locate most of the more advanced Lego pieces around the house, started looking at construction materials (the T-channel stuff from 8020.net is fricken AWESOME). I want to make something based on the rocker-bogie suspension used by the mars rovers but building it is going to be quite complex. In the course of my work so far, I have discovered that electric propulsion is extremely expensive for anything larger than what requires an RC model motor. Control electronics for electric vehicles is damned expensive. In a situation where each wheel has a motor, it is prohibitive.

I have managed to figure out a way to reduce the motor count to one on each side using sprockets. One sprocket is mounted in the center of the bogie and powers those two wheels, the other sprocket is mounted near the center of the rocker and powers the rocker wheel and the bogie sprocket. Lego Mindstorms have been a very helpful modeling mechanism for me.

But overall, I am very disappointed with the costs associated with electric power. Conversion of my old Toyota pickup truck would cost more than what I paid for the thing in 1997. It would cost about $10,000 to convert a $5,000 truck to do a good job of it. Building a vehicle larger than a go kart that requires more than one traction motor is hugely expensive. I could save thousands of dollars by using small lawnmower gasoline engines and using a tach signal to close the loop on a throttle servo. I am talking hundreds of dollars to control 6-1hp gasoline engines vs thousands to control 6-1hp electric motors. Hydraulics would probably be somewhere in between but hydraulic motors are generally only efficient for intermittent duty such as steering so I might have a small hydraulic pump (power steering pump) run off the gas engines on the four corner wheels for steering actuators (conventional auto steering racks with one arm removed at each wheel actuated by .... something).

[Mozy bonz]

Air Force idea of using drones like the Predator to save pilots.

where my mom lives is between Fresno and Bakersfield they do the testing out of Edwards afb. I was watching tv and they where talking about how it worked, and in the screen i could see Porterville.

in the 60's I rember double sonic booms that would rock the house.

in the 80's we would go up in the mountains and watch top gun fights
Edward flys over the mountains there. you would hear more that you see.
ya.... sitting in the hot tub at the cabin hearing the burn.

you guys are giving me flashbacks...... I love this shit

[can't sit still]

Mozy, I made my own glass plate capacitor,,,super easy and cheap.

"I have a 14 year old son, and I would like to do somthing like that with him."
While you're trying to think of something electrical, you could pass the time with other diversions. Take a 2 liter bottle and put crushed dry-ice in it. 2 ounces should be plenty. Hold the bottle on it's side and squeeze it a little to form a resevoir up by the neck. Put in a few ounces of water. Screw on the cap and toss it. No flames or shrapnel.It's plenty loud.
It's the safest explosive I could come up with for kids.

I never did figure how to make a cat launcher with it though.

[Mozy bonz]

oh we moved on .....battlebot .....if i could remember how to spell remember.

battlebot..... I will get back with you on that one. I must go now need to do somthing.

love this thanks

[can't sit still]

Geekster, the hydrostatic motors that they use on the Bobcat will run for a long time. I think that you're limited to other means if you want high speed.
Edwin V Gray built an electric car years ago in Van Nuys. Ronald Raygun gave him the "inventor of the year award" He used scalar energy. The car worked great. Co-incidentally, Van Nuys was home to General Motors Assembly Division
The LA district attorney raided his shop and confiscated his plans and models. They couldn't dream up any charges so they released him,,,but not his models. His shop was bombed twice. I have the original articles somewhere. He was eventually run out of town and finally eliminated. Same happened to Morray?sp. Tesla was made a non-person when his patrons learned that they couldn't charge for wireless power transmission.

[robotland]

But overall, I am very disappointed with the costs associated with electric power. .

I'm still building the electrical assist, but for anything playa-bound I'm either pedaling it or putting gas in it....Electricity's that stuff they invented to run EL wire with!

CSS- A 3,000 lb. Battlebot IS a weapon! I'd just pick the losers outta my treads!

[can't sit still]

Robotland, The whole trick is stored energy, the more,,,the better. You could store a shitload of hydrogen and convert it directly to electricity. You charge your capacitors and fire a huge RF burst at your opponent. The only problem is that it's pretty easy to shield against electric energy. That's why I opted for propane. It's really hard to shield for sustained heat. There's always chemical LASERs. Kinetic weapons still beat most things. Look at the shells in the General Dynamics Warthog. They say that 1 30mm? projectile will lift a main battle tank a foot off the ground.
Dan

Just read your post. Uhhhhh, the general rule in BB is weight class. You'll be up against other 3,000 lb bots. Lots Of Luck

[robotland]

So what I REALLY need to do is just build a 'bot that's SO big, and SO heavy, that there'd be nothing in its class! I win by default!

Excuse me, I have a Dreadnaught to construct.....

[can't sit still]

Here's your motive power unit.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/Histo ... h13-1.html

[robotland]

NOW you're talkin'!

[Mozy bonz]

I think.............Death ray

[geekster]

The problem with large motors is in the controlling. To get anything like any efficiency you need a multipole brushless DC or 3-phase AC motor. Controllers for these things for motors of any heft cost in the thousands of dollars. Now imagine something like a Mars rover kind of vehicle where you have a motor on each of 6 wheels. In order to go in a straight line, all 6 motors must be synchronized. Now you are talking some serious complexity. If you start driving multiple wheels with a single motor, you begin to lose mobility.

I found some Sanyo Denki servo motors for sale surplus but after talking to the Sanyo people I discovered that these were custom made for Rockwell and there is absolutely no information available unless it could be somehow obtained from Rockwell.

I want to build a version about go kart size as an initial working model and then work up to one that is fairly large using automotive wheels/suspension.

[robotland]

I determined through experimentation that four independently contolled and powered Powerwheels motors are enough to shuttle my bulky carcass around, on a flat surface....With decent pneumo tires, I'd be okay on-playa for about an hour, until the batts got cashed or the dust got in. For now, they're operating heads and arms of carved foam zombies along my Haunted Trail of Terror.
Eventually I'd like about ten Powerwheels cars that I can saw in half (they're rear-wheel drive) and connect like a centipede....Coupla deep-cycles and some solar cells on top, and Yee-hah! Two MPH, here I come!

(...Do you get that I like those Powerwheels cars?)

[theCryptofishist]

[can't sit still]

You should be able to come up with something from the ideas here. http://www.gyre.org/news/related/Inform ... ic+Weapons
I guarantee that you can find deals here. http://web.govliquidation.com/
After all,,,money is no object to these people. How about some good used stepper motors?
Dan

Almost forgot, if you get thirsty while you're working, you can just zip down to the pub for a cool one. http://sdsefi.com/features/apr00stool.htm

[dragonfly Jafe]

... What would your main weapon be if you had a 3,000 lb battle-bot without weapons limitations?...

magnetic shaped charge limpet mines? Or a liquid nitrogen sprayer? Or perhaps a quick-set expanding foam adhesive?

[can't sit still]

OK, just for conversation,,,,forget offence. what about defence. How would you defend against limpet mines, liquid nitrogen, EM attacks, flamethrowers etc.
Your exterier would have to be ceramic covered unobtainium. You have to have electroststic lift and propulsion. Treads blow off too easy. What else????

[geekster]

Actually isn't all that hard, I don't think. There is currently a vehicle in the Marine inventory that is designed to take hits from mines that they bought from South Africa. Basically the thing sits way up off the road and the underside is shaped almost like a boat hull. It comes down to a V. A blast under the vehicle has it's energy deflected to either side much like water is deflected to either side of the hull of a boat at it cuts through the sea.

So if you want to scale it up, think about the angles you see on something like an F117 stealth fighter. The thing is designed so that RADAR is not reflected back to it's source but is instead reflected off at many angles dissipating the energy and scattering it. You should be able to do the same with blast. But that only takes away one mode of anti-armor.

There are basically three modes: Blast, penetration, and spall. Blast is what you get from an anti-armor mine. It is designed to mess up the traction system by either ruining the tracks, flipping the vehicle over, or disabling the driver or a combination of those. Penetration is designed to penetrate the armor and introduce a high speed projectile through the penetration that will generate a spray of molten metal, high temperature gas, and flying metal debris inside the vehicle causing secondary explosions, fires, and/or crew incapacitation. Spall works like those little desk toys with the balls where you pull one ball up and allow it to drop. It hits the end of a chain of balls and the last ball in the chain flys up and falls back. You hit the outside of the vehicle with enough force that a piece of the inside wall comes off and bounces around inside hurting crew and causing mechanical damage.

So what you want to do is first have lots of angles to deflect blast and not present a large surface directly exposed to the main shock wave. You want to try to make a glancing blow, or lots of glancing blows at different angles. That mitigates blast. A second thing you can do is surround vulerable areas with something akin to cyclone fence set a few inches off the surface of the armor. This will cause spall and penetration rounds to detonate before they reach the skin of the vehicle. Another defense against spall and penetration is "reactive armor" which is armor that explodes outwards when something else is trying to explode inwards pushing the inbound shockwave back or weakening it. Finally you have a spall shield which is usually a kevlar shell set a couple of inches away from the inside skin. If a piece of the skin spalls off, it hits the outside of the shell which protects the crew and other stuff inside.

There is one thing that nothing can protect against and was the reason behind a big propoganda effort by the Russians in the early 1980's to prevent the US from deploying. During the cold war NATO was faced with the prospect of being overrun with more tanks than it had anti-tank rounds. The Warsaw Pact had thousands of tanks, many dating back to the 1950's. They could simply contiune presenting targets until we were out of ammo. There were no such thing as as the advanced airborne anti-tank weapons that we have today. It pretty much took a tank to kill a tank. So we developed the "Enhanced Radiation Warhead" also called the Neutron Bomb. The idea was to cause an air burst that created a large pulse of very short lived radiation but little blast and almost no fallout that would penetrate tank armor and kill the crews. We could then take out entire formations of tanks and our troops could occupy the areas within 24 hours (I have heard within 8 hours mentioned). We would put these on cruise missiles. In case of an attack, we could punch lanes through the attacking formations and take out entire follow-on formations. There was no defense for it. You would need so much shielding as to make the tank immobile.

The Russians then mounted a campaign to fund political dissent against deploying both the cruise missiles and the neutron warhead. The "marketing" went along the lines of "NATO wants a bomb that would kill everyone in the cities but leave the industry intact so the west could take it all and get really, really, rich" or something like that. They succeeded in the political pressure for the warhead but not the cruise missiles. It was amazing that people would accept strategic nukes that laid waste to hundreds of square miles with long lived radiation but would not accept a weapon that would primarilly kill only oposition military in a very small area and would not destroy the land.

So ... if you want a weapon that is going to work every time, you need radiation that will clobber whatever is controlling the tank, be it nuclear or electromagnetic. EMP will penetrate ceramic armor. For an R/C battle bot, you would want something that could fry the opposing bot's R/C circuitry without clobbering your own.

[Badger]

I keep hearing that number of suitcase bombs being "missing" bandied about but I never hear of any credible source for it other than someone quoting someone else.

Buh!

[can't sit still]

Badger, I'm out in the sticks on a sloooooww dialup. You're sure making me work hard.

"Former Russian Security Council Secretary Aleksandr Lebed has stirred controversy in both Russia and the United States with his allegations that the Russian government is currently unable to account for some eighty small atomic demolition munitions (ADMs) which were manufactured in the USSR during the Cold War. Lebed originally made the allegations in a closed meeting with a US congressional delegation in May 1997. His charges generated public controversy three months later when he repeated them in an interview with the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes, which was broadcast on 7 September 1997.(1) Russian officials initially dismissed Lebed’s charges, saying all of the country’s nuclear weapons were accounted for and under strict control. Top-ranking Russian defense officials later went further and denied that any such weapons had ever been built by the USSR, claiming that they would be too expensive to maintain and too heavy for practical use. Lebed has stood by his statement, however, and his charges have been backed by a former advisor to President Yeltsin, Aleksey Yablokov, who told a US Congressional subcommittee on 2 October 1997 that he was “absolutely sure” that such ADMs had been ordered in the 1970s by the KGB.

Despite a coordinated campaign by Russian officials designed to discredit Lebed and Yablokov, technical inaccuracies and inconsistencies undermine the credibility of the official Russian denials that Soviet ADMs were never manufactured. In addition, the current controversy is not the first public discussion of whether former Soviet ADMs are under adequate control in Russia. During 1995, a flurry of Russian media reports claimed that Chechen separatist fighters had obtained such weapons. And in January 1996, long before the current media furor, the Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies received information from a Russian presidential advisor that an unspecified number of small ADMs had been had been manufactured in the 1970s for use by the KGB.(2) This evidence does not corroborate Lebed’s claims that ADMs have “gone missing,” but it does strongly suggest that the Russian government is not being completely candid in its discussion of the issue."

OK, you have testimony from The security council secretary of the enviornment? and an advisor to Yeltsin. They testified to the US congress.
True, it's hearsay, but so is SALT and "Star Wars" I've never seen evidence of either one. Like most things, you have to examine the evidence and decide or suspend judgment.

I posted somewhere else about just what constitutes "proof" In most cases it's difficult to nail down well.

[dragonfly Jafe]

OK, just for conversation,,,,forget offence. what about defence. How would you defend against limpet mines, liquid nitrogen, EM attacks, flamethrowers etc.
Your exterier would have to be ceramic covered unobtainium. You have to have electroststic lift and propulsion. Treads blow off too easy. What else????

As Geekster has pointed out, a big part would be lightweight panels set off the main body to deflect heat, fluids, gas jets from sahpe charges, etc. Several inches of air should prevent the N2 from effecting anything also. You would maybe want these to be somewhat easily torn off, however, to prevent easy grappling?

a metallic mesh that is well grounded should prevent or minimize electrical/EM attacks (or perhaps storing the energy in an on-board capacitor for later use?)

Teflon coated (or maybe just grease) to prevent sticky stuff.

Silver/reflective to minimize high-energy devices like lasers (also helps with heat attacks, and gains style points)

Something to prevent being flipped over (or the ability to right itself)

[can't sit still]

lightweight panels,,,,

prevent grappling?

metallic mesh

Teflon coated

Silver

Ummmm , yes ,I see exactly what you mean.

[dragonfly Jafe]

what I meant was lightweight TEAR-AWAY panels...I recall seeing some strategies that centered on pulling the opponent over using grapples...

of course, no one said there was any sort of limit on time or money to put this together! You just have to approach it like Edison did...

[Mozy bonz]

ok simple now

This log spliter was great fun for me.
It was made from tool stock.
A stake about 2 ft long.
At the tip of the sharp end a 3/8 hole 2 in deep on the side a fuse hole at the bottom of the 3/8 hole. Fill the hole with black power and put a wad of cotten to keep in the power. Tap the point end with the power into a log you want to split. Light the fuse... boom. log splits stake drops to the ground.
A small can of Black power pile of wood... ya ....boom ...boom....
much more fun that an axe.
we broke ours after 20 years of use. The plans came from a book in our shop class. Wish I had that book now.
We made a 4 in bore cannon also.

They would never let kids make that stuff now.

[can't sit still]

This is kinda cool. They can evidently nuetralize radioactivity. That would make me feel better about nuke plants.
http://www.michaelmandeville.com/paradi ... ummary.htm

[can't sit still]

Here's a guy who's good at gadgets. He should come to BM
He's got some really cool pics of some really cool machines.
http://tesladownunder.com/index.html