TankPaq — iPaq powered Tank

The long road that led to CuBot started right here. The engineering thesis project was supposed to be simple and pleasant to build. Far from it. A friend and I got hold of a tank chassis with full mechanics. Unfortunately, in the spirit of universal fairness, the robot couldn't move evenly — when it did move, it either bolted off at top speed or veered to one side. Reasons:

• too much weight (gel battery, ~2.5kg)
• too little reduction on the motors and tracks too weak (we snapped them several times)
• asymmetric H-bridges (40A forward, 20A reverse)

So the project never got serious applause — though if we'd dropped the idea of powering the iPaq off the same source (i.e., swapped the 12V battery for a ~380g hobby pack), most of it probably would have worked.