INFORMATION ABOUT BOT FIGHTING High voltage electric discharge

NicoleScripting

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My character has to win a bot fight and she's super smart. Unfortunately, her writer is not super smart and the closest I ever got to bot fighting was when I attended votech for graphic design and I had to go into the engineer building to ask them what color they wanted their vinyl sticker for the robot van to be.

I read that most competitions do not permit high voltage electric discharge... How would one go about doing that? More specifically, if she was going into a shop to ask for the parts to make that happen, what would she be asking for?

OR is it something that you do with the parts you already have? If so, how does one do that?
 

Mark HJ

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I'm not an expert on bot fighting, but the first question that springs to mind is what do you hope to achieve with a high voltage discharge? Presumably, if you could get it to pass through the internals of the opponent you might fry the electronics, but I assume most bots have a metal shell that would make this difficult. The first thing I would worry about is really good insulation because on your bot the high voltage stuff will already be inside the metal shell. Even if you get that right, those high voltage discharges could still induce voltage spikes inside your own bot, enough to disrupt control or damage the electronics.

There is a wonderful beast called a Ruhmkorff coil that can put out seriously high voltages, but they tend to be quite bulky beasts. I recall one at school that could fire up a six inch plus spark. At uni there was a piece of demo equipment that charged up a bank of capacitors that were 'linked' with spark gaps, with the 'final' capacitor having a slightly smaller gap so that when it reached a certain voltage it would discharge into the next one and set off a cascade that produced a huge voltage in the final spark. (Now that I go an look it up, it is called a Marx generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx_generator and they use them for things like artificial lightning...)

Probably the simplest way to do it for your bot would be to buy a tazer and rig that into the bot. Presumably, if you wanted more power out, you could rig several in series - so far as I know, the output voltage from a tazer is DC.

What you really need is a bot fighting expert to find out what a high voltage discharge would be used for.
 

NicoleScripting

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Thanks for all the information, Mark. And for the link!

What you really need is a bot fighting expert to find out what a high voltage discharge would be used for.

Yeah I think I might need to call my old math teacher from middle-school. She's built several bots for fighting.
 

Mark HJ

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Further thought... if you really want to do damage, get one of these:

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The only downside is they are pretty much a two-person carry, so you would need a really big bot. The postgrad in the lab next door to me (x years ago, where x is a depressingly large number) had the output socket short-circuit. The boom was heard all round the department and she had to be driven home because she was shaking so badly.
 

Tsu Dho Nimh

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If you were wanting to DIY, instead of buying some Tasers and using the innards, you would be asking for capacitors. They store electrical energy "under pressure" and release it quickly or slowly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolytic_capacitor

They are DANGEROUS. If they short out, the metal casing might explode, sending shrapnel and the innards of the capacitor flying all over the place. A large one (beer can sized) blew up while I was in the warehouse with some equipment that was being checked out, just plugged in and warming up. It sounded like a hand grenade and left aluminum scraps embedded in the packing cases. By sheer luck, I was closest to the machine but behind a couple of shelf units full of boxes of supplies. I would have been badly cut up.

Worst case is if the end blows out, sending the metal end flying out like a bullet.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=exploding+capacitor has a selection of them.