I am rewriting the post so that y’all can actually understand what I’m doing. I’m clueless, so I might be using the wrong words or bad ideas. I could be asking in the wrong place, but I’d love some ideas!

So, I will be competing in a robotics tournament in around a month for my school. We are supposed to design a robot that can move certain objects (golf balls, stuffed animals, and 10” dowel rods) to score points. The course has a sloped region so I figured a Tank would be the best way to go. For the moving of items I wanted a mix between a bulldozer and dump truck so that I could pick things up then dump them where they need to go (some kind of “scooping” door to push things into the dump portion.)

The thing that is insane to me, is that there are barely any guidelines. The only thing they told us we had to do was: Use (1) 7.2v NICD 2000mah battery, can’t go over $150, and has to be controlled by cables. I was looking into the saber tooth motor controller, but they would make me go over the price limit.

I would also like to have variable speed, forward and reverse if that’s possible using a variable speed motor controller.

If if there’s any guideance you guys can give me that would be absolutely fantastic, if not, thanks for reading!

Where are you? I have a used sabertooth 2x12 that might work.

I’m in conroe TX, and I actually have no idea how the sabertooths work. I just crossed them off the list because of the price.

Sabertooth works like any other esc. Are you familiar with rc at all? If not you may have your work cut out for you man. Just being honest..there is a learning curve. Maybe check out robotmarketplace.com or servocity.com. You may get some ideas on those sites. If we can help we will....

"and has to be controlled by cables".

So no RC?

How would it run on a battery and be controlled by cables???

Servo cables, maybe? For controlling the working arm?

Well 150 bucks is a tight budget for a true robot style compeditor, especially if you plan to scratch build.

My suggestion would be to go to Wally world, choose the cheapest all terrain RC truck and modify to add servo actuated dozer, grabber, dump wired to controller box.

Even the RC controller can be taped together to your custom servo control box, for example.

The battery, since wired, can be located in the controller instead of the vehicle and also supply the battery terminals in the empty battery box in the RC truck, for example too.

If this competition is timed, more reason to go with all terrain tired vehicle instead of tracked.