Angus's Guide to Hacking Servos into Gear Motors for Antweights

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This is not meant to be comprehensive guide on how to do everything this is just meant to be an overview of what you need to get started and where to go to find more information.

Safety

Combat robots are dangerous that is one of the reasons why putting them in an arena and watching them destroy each other is fun. This means that they are also capable of destroying you. Despite this building robot can be done in a safe manner if you think about what you are doing and take a few precautions. All the weapons you can build basically rely on the transfer of large amounts of energy into the other robot whether by spinning, flipping, launching, ect. So simply don't test these sorts of weapons in situations where you are not adequately protected. Do it in an arena or equivalent area with safety measures in place to ensure you don't get hurt!

Secondly a driving robot (even without a weapon) running into your ankles could easily break one, or cause sever damage, so make sure your robot can be properly controlled and have some form of barrier it can't drive over between it and yourself before letting it loose for testing. When testing your robot on the bench you should always have your wheels elevated.

There is many other things which I haven't covered here but if you have any doubts before doing something don't do it.
I take no responsibility for any injury sustained by building anything shown in this guide. If you don't have the skills, tools or patience to do it properly and safely STOP NOW

We now return you to your regular program.

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Antweights are a great fun class to get started in, however gearmotors small enough to run in antweights can be quite costly, as can the controllers for them! This price is coming down rapidly however still by far the cheapest method to get an antweight robot moving is by modifying servos.

What is a servo? A servo in the context of radio control models is used to articulate control surfaces such as in an airplane wing by precisely following the position of the control stick on the transmitter. This means a standard servo has a small (slightly less than 180degrees) range of very precise movement. For robot drives however, we need them to rotate all the way around! To do this, we must do a little hacking. This is my method: