Introduction to melty bots and stuff:

So, for those of you who don't know, a melty robot, or melty brain robot is a fighting robot (like Robot Wars, Battlebots, Robogames, etc.), that spins itself around very quickly and uses an accelerometer to determine a "front"of the spinning bot. It will then light up an LED once in each rotation to illuminate the "front"of the bot. From this, the on board computer (this one uses an Arduino Uno R3) will take a value from the radio control system to alter motors speed to make the robot "drift" in a direction. Say if you push the control stick forward, then once in each rotation, the motor(s) will be turned on when they are at the "back" of the robot, and off when they are at the "front" of the robot to make it "drift" towards a point. And on the spinning robot you can add weapons and other dangerous items to damage the opponents robot. For a few examples of this kind of fighting robot, search for: Melty B, Death By Translation, Spinning Tortoise, MBX or Berzerker into google or youtube or other. Rich Olson came up with this brilliant idea and developed it with Melty B, so I take no credit for the idea, but I'm only building a robot like his because I wanted to try out something different.

Step 1: Basic Frame

Here os the base plate of my first robot, called Shred. It is just MDF and some Meccano screws, but you've got to start somewhere!

Step 2: Adding Components and Armour

Just adding in the Arduino Uno R3, MFA Como Drills 360 motors, 700mah 9.6v NiMH battery, and 1.2mm aluminium side panels.

Step 3: Wheels!!!!!!!

Here are the BaneBots 60x10mm Green wheels beingattached to Shred. But I did find that the wheels would fly off during a spin up test due to centrifugal force and not very tight grub screws.