I feel like the Ant communtiy is the most popular

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Remote-Controlled Dave
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Re: I feel like the Ant communtiy is the most popular

Post by Remote-Controlled Dave »

Look at that, brushed motor brilliance. Looking at old robots for my A-Z has made me wonder how we ever fit anything in weight.
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daveimi
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Re: I feel like the Ant communtiy is the most popular

Post by daveimi »

This is really weird but I was thinking this today! I started with feathers when you could buy a lot of the "hard to make" bits off the shelf. Those sellers have called it a day recently so arguably the feathers take a lot more ingenuity to build than they did. It means that I don't feel there a good starting point like they once were. In addition to this, they level of competition has gone crazy, they're so well designed and engineered that it's made them expensive to compete with. For this reason I decided to stop with the feathers and focus on ants, but also for some reason build a heavy. The heavies have their events, and the ants have theirs, but save for the fw champs there isn't a feather community with an arena putting dedicated events on meaning you have to tack on to someone else's event. I think the feathers are absolutely fantastic, but save for the champs seem to have found this grey area to live in. If you want the challenge and a bit of fun and something to build, build an ant. If you have the knowledge and money and fancy a go, build a heavy. But save for the champs, there don't seem to be many reasons to build a feather whilst they're only hosted at heavy events. Whilst I was building feathers I was having to wait for the heavy events to come round, so thought well I may as well just build a heavy. My ramblings don't really have a conclusion I suppose, but I would be interested to see where the weight category goes save for the champs. I am only interested in coming to ant events and building a heavy just because it's something I've always wanted to do. It hasn't taken much more to build a heavy than it has a feather buy the time I've bought steel sheet, cut it up, welded it together, made motor mounts, battery packs and cabled it etc. The beetle thing could have potentially been massive, but that has found the same grey area the feathers have in that it too has no dedicated events etc.

Besides which the ant community is a lot friendlier and nicer to talk to, although if you know who to ask the heavy people are utterly fantastic once they see you're serious and have a bit of cash and no how. It's the people like Will, Trev, Craig (the saint), the Tiny Toon team, Craig with Tanto all being friendly and nice to talk to that have been making the heavy thing possible for me.
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limpet
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Re: I feel like the Ant communtiy is the most popular

Post by limpet »

We`ve been doing the FW class for a few years now mainly due to cost and manageability and I agree there is a lack of FW competitive events, although small they just don`t justify events of their own except the demo ones (which are good fun but still no trophies to take home). Heavys are fine and the teams are just as friendly but are usually as busy as hell which is probably why they don`t seem so approachable.
Ants for me are probably the best class for so many reasons but don`t give up on the beetles, I`m hoping to build more and eventually get some sort of event organised.
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