A surprising amount has happened on this project before I began blogging it but it seemed sensible and helpful to begin. So far progress has been slow and steady but littered with frustrating mistakes and problems. But let me start at the beginning because otherwise none of this will make sense.
I have wanted to build a combat robot ever since Robot Wars burnt and bashed its way onto out TV screens some 13 years ago. But due to a lack of funds and an electronically and mechanically ignorant 7 year old brain it was always just a mad idea. The closes I have ever got until now was a Mini Robot Wars competition at a local engineering exhibition every year where lower secondary school students would build little machines to just shove the other around the arena with no real weapons. I leapt on this every time it came round but to no avail and most of the time the machine ended up getting shoved off the arena and breaking when it hit the floor. But by this point Robot Wars had been cut down and was no longer popular or cool to try and build fighting robots for some stupid reason.
I had pretty much given it up as a lost cause until about 5 months ago but after seeing the Gadget shows episode on combat robots I realized that Robot Wars still existed in some form or other. Since then I have been catching up on the latest developments in robotic combat and having it dawn on me that now I am at university with money of my own, and that real money not the £10 a month pocket money that I got from my parents*, that I might have a realistic chance of building a combat robot of my own.
But if I thought that it would now be relatively easy to just build a robot, I cant remember if i did or not, I was so wrong. Nothing is ever as simple as you think it is!
*Yes £10 is quite a lot but the transmitter alone is around £100 and to get to the stage I am now would take 30 months!
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