Beetlebot

A while back, I saw a cool little robot project by Jérôme Demers. I first encountered the Beetlebot on the Instructables website. The Beetlebot is a very simple (and cheap) design requiring only a handful of accessible electronics components (2 motors, 2 lever switches a battery clip and some wire).

I won’t bore you with a description of the build since his page (and several others including the Make! site) have done this. It would also appear that Jérôme’s design has made it into a couple of “Science Education” pages, tutorials, demos etcetera.

I present, however, my build of the Beetlebot …

Where Jérôme uses some shrink wire cover to act as the “wheels” of his Beetlebot, I’ve simply used two more wooden beads hot-glued to the shafts of the to motors.

I’ve been collecting the bits and pieces for this bot for a while (I had some of the parts, but I needed to buy a motor, a battery clip and some spade connectors) and I finally got around to building the project.

While I was soldering, I found it difficult to solder in the connecting wires. My old eyes are not what they used to be … I was using my reading glasses and a magnifying glass to be able to see the connections well enough.

I used solid core wire for the connections rather than multi-strand so that the wire “behaved” better while I was soldering … plus I had some leftover pieces from my last project.

The spade connectors had to be cut down so that the antennae didn’t interfere with each other too much when they activated. I simply used my side-cutters and then soldered the straightened paperclip into the socket before crimping.

The build went very well and I didn’t have very much rework to do. The only real hassle was when I was hot-gluing the trundle-wheel paperclip to the battery clip. It didn’t want to work all that well, so I am supporting the glue with some electrical tape. I also used both hot glue and electrical tape to hold the motors onto the brass strip.

Also, the hot glue blob for the passenger side antenna was a bit excessive and interfered with the operation of the antenna … so I did a little scalpel work.

Balance is important with the Beetlebot. Make sure that you follow Jérôme’s instructions about placement of the motors … if they are too far back, the Beetlebot will face-plant a lot.

The antennae come off very easily, the first time I let my Beetlebot free, it scuttled straight under my lounge chair and left one of it’s antennae under there.

All up, this build cost me about $12AUD and I bought all of the electronic components from eBay. The beads came from Spotlight and the paperclips came from my office.

The project took me about 1 ½ hours to complete … maybe I’ll make a carapace for my Beetlebot, but then again, I quite like the way it looks now. I wonder if I can get away with not giving this toy to my darling daughter?