The tank that will follow you and serve you beer. Coolness is over 9000!
Story
Abstract
There are things that deep inside every man wants to have. Combining beer and tanks is one of these things! This project will be about this thing, a voice controlled tank that delivers beer to you with an autonomous “follow me” function or with an RC control. Let’s build the beer tank of our dreams!
Chassis
We need a good base for the tank. I found this chassis on banggood. It was quite cheap and it looked so cool that I needed to buy one.
Right after receiving the product came the first problem. Due to the improper packaging it suffered some serious injuries during shipping.
It took lots of hours and lots of glue but luckily mostly I could repair it.
Crane
The tank chassis contains both the motors and the gearboxes, so the next step was to figure out how to serve the beer. After numerous ideas I figured out that the best and coolest way to do it is to hide the beer and then elevate it using a crane. This is the basic design that I came up with:
I used my old metal builder kit because I needed a strong but easy-to-modify skeleton. The crane is connected to a stepper motor with a fishing line The 28byj-48 stepper motor was great for this purpose. It is not fast but it could easily lift the crane and the beer. Actually the motor is so strong that if I didn’t stop it in time it broke the fishing line.
It worked wonderfully, however the skeleton wasn’t strong enough and started to bend very early. To solve this problem I needed to increase structural integrity. I used two, 30 cm long hard wood rulers and some extra parts to make it stronger. After some drilling, sawing and rasping here is the next version:
As you can see the modifications solved the bending problem and it is very stable.
Case
A Walabot (Developer version) will be the ‘eye’ of the tank. More on Walabot in the Walabot section. The front place has a holder part for the Walabot. I had a metal part that has the perfect size to make use of Walabot’s magnetic holder. I also made a Walabot logo shape out of hot glue to prevent the Walabot from rotating on the round part:
The magnetic mounting is great because I can easily use one Walabot in multiple projects without any serious disassembly and it is also strong enough.
I started to make a cover around the frame to hide the parts. I used black cardboard paper and plastic sheets for the cover.
At this point the front and middle part wasn’t covered. I also needed a hatch on the top to hide the beer completely. To move the hatch I used two servos, some hot blue and some insulating tape. This top door used only for design, it doesn’t really protects the beer. However it is very cool when it opens up and elevates the beer.
The doors are made of two plastic sheets, wood sticks and some glued and rolled up paper, glued together with hot glue. It is not the prettiest thing, but in real life it doesn’t look that bad. I painted black everything. In real life it is much more difficult to see the difference between the black parts.
Read more: WalaBeer Tank
