Minitaur Build Log

Inspired by how amazing and cool Riobotz's Touro and Minotaur are, I decided I wanted to make something small and derpy that kind of resembled their robots.Thus Minitaur was born. My initial plan was to simply have a unibody 3d printed robot with a smooth drum only made for gyro dancing.Many hours of printing later and this was born!

The drum is some sort of 4130 I found around MITERS with my classic milled slots and then waterjet aluminum pieces to transmit torque.As bad as it sounds, the weapon motor is embedded inside the drum, supported only by it's weeny 3mm shaft on one side, and a 1/4-20 bolt and 1/4" bearing on the other side."It isn't made for combat so it doesn't really matter right?"The next day I got bored of just gyro dancing with my visually attractive robot and decided to make a better drum

As expected it hit hard, but didn't fit into a weight class and so was retired to my shelf for a couple of weeks.I then decided it might be fun to enter it into the 3d printed weight class at Mass Destruction.I wasn't very happy with the original drum shape; it had two teeth so it had much less bite on opponents, and thus less excitement. I scoured the internet and found a nice image of the cross section of Riobotz's drum (it was designed as a research project by an MIT grad student). I sketchily sketched it up in Solidworks, and printed a drum as solid as I could.

Voila! Nice monotone robot (the top plate was replaced by polycarb later)It also still gyro dances even without the massive mass.

Fred also printed the drum for me using Nylon which is the drum I ended up using for competition.

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