UTAS Warman Finals

My AutoCAD model.

At midnight last night my tank-like vehicle still didn't move. A 6V motor running off a 5V battery via a PIC and little power transistor just didn't have enough to even rotate the rubber tracks. But the electronics worked great. Then at night it came to me in a dream, the components, the circuit diagram. As soon as the shops opened I drove out to Jaycar and bought another 12V motor and a 12V 1.2AH battery. Back home I hooked it up still using the 5V power for the PIC to switch the transistor, and the big 12V battery for the motor. Now our robot tank was powerfull and fast. I rushed to uni where we got only about 3 practice runs in. In practice it only got over the 65mm barrier once.

This was fitted with other contraptions but they were too embarasing to show since I didn't make them. I am pleased with the performance of the bare vehicle.

After a short presentation, we did our first official run. The tank lept into life (a little too fast really) and somehow got over both barriers and collected a golf ball as a bonus. Except the 7 second timer ran out just after the vehicle had already got to the end. So zero points for the first run. We changed the program to 5 seconds for the second run, but at the first barrier it broke a O-ring drive belt.

Pictured here is the drive sprocket, which I made on the lathe. I had to get out the calculator and plan this design!


With all that finished, I took the tank over to show Brandon and the kids. They loved it, and Brandon says he is now going to do engineering at uni. Mostly he wants me to teach him how to build little tanks. During the evening we got smoke to come out of the power transistor. Fun while it lasted.

You can see here the battery packs, and circuit board with the heat sink, and the motor with drive belt. It was all zip tied down at the lat minuite.