My little "combat robot trainer and test platform" is up and running. I call it the 'Trike'. I also refer to it as the six-hour battle bot, since that's about how long it took me to make it.

It is a blast. I wish it was faster and had some traction, but that doesn't diminsh the fun. I took it to the parking lot across the street (it needed some help getting up the hill, due to lack of traction), but mostly I just drove it around the carport of the apartment building. It got the attention of a couple of my neighbors. One neighbor friend who knows nothing about this sort of thing thought it was cool, so I let her drive it around a bit. She was pretty good at it for never doing anything like that before. I think it is partly due to the intuitive way I have the controls set up, too.

Anyway, I captured some video of the beast. Have fun watching it as I head back out to do some more driving! ;-)

The video clip shows how the Trike can be controlled at slow speeds as well as at full speed. I want to put some wheels on it that actually have some rubber on them - or wrap them with some kind of rubber belt. The drive wheels are just this hard plastic and they're already very worn. The front wheel is just a caster wheel (that I originally bought a couple years ago for my battle bot, Road Rage).

It works well. Well, I'm off again. I want to see how long these batteries last.