Probably have a better chance of finding something in the US than if you lived in, say...I dunno. Australia? Some small tropical island in the middle of the Pacific? Madagascar?
South Africa? No, I'm not bitter, why do you ask? 
@MonkeyHead
Any suggestions for building bots and stuff? Always seemed cool to me, but I've never started.
If you have any specific questions, I will be happy to help, but my general advice to people looking to start out would be as follows...
The electronics can be initially a little scary, but 99% of things can be done with off the shelf components via online how-to's, which makes things very easy once you get your head around the basics. Sure, you can add gyros, multi channel controls, pulsed phased input to motors, and all sorts of mad shenanigans, but it is just more to go wrong, and often the effort is not worth the rewards when it all ends up as junk any way. I would encourage the shielding of any motors though. Learnt that the hard way, I did.
I generally favour offensive capability over armour, which I feel to be generally a waste of weight once you go beyond basic protection, as most enemies will either not be able to penetrate even the most basic protection, or be so powerful even the best armour is useless. Things are heavy, and weight is your enemy. I once competed with a notable exception which broke the legendary weapon on Razer (non televised, alas), but such insane armour weight prevented much in the way of weapons, leaving me with a glorified high speed push bot. A subsequent version retained a similar chassis and drive train, but replaced the most of the armour weight for 2 contra-rotating flywheels. It killed everything, including itself, and was hell to drive. Much fun.
Mechanically, stick to stock parts rather than custom builds as much as possible. This keeps costs down, and makes running repairs trivial. I used a lot of racing go kart bits back in the day - sprockets, chains, gearings, wheels, bearings... all standard sizes and connections. Nice and simple. Simple is king. Car spare parts or salvage parts are also handy, as are plumbing bits. The one extravagance I would recommend is on a good set of gel cell batteries. Yuasa are a good brand, and can be found in wheelchairs etc. This is much easier if you stick to simple shapes formed from tubular chassis to begin with. Say, a wedge or a box. Leave the organic scorpion shapes until later. Heck, even my most advanced creation was little more than a T shaped chassis with a few carapace style aspects. Simple shapes can also facilitate being able to run upside down or on your side, which is very handy.
Learn to weld, and as such stick to fairly plain steel or aluminium to begin with. Fancy alloys have a tendency to be a pain in the ass to work with or cut. A notable memory is struggling to cut through a hefty duralumin plate that formed a sort of carapace with a plasma cutter, which was a right pain in the ass that did not go so well. The job would have been easier with a plain metal, and easier to tidy up afterwards.
Do not be delicate when building. The end product needs to be tough, and will get based around. If you are worried about dropping it off a workbench in case it breaks, you are doing it wrong. Deliberately drop it. Run it down some stairs. Make it stand up to such things.
A decent bot well driven will beat a good bot with a bad driver every time. Practice lots. Bash up washing machines or other junk. Find out little things like how performance drops off over time, or handling quirks.
Oh, and saftey. I have seen so many horrible near misses. Be sure there is a kill switch on the external of the bot you can reach by hand. Some kind of "pull out loop" is a traditional favourite. Make sure you have some kind of cradle or frame that keeps the wheels from touching any surface for testing, to prevent out of control zooming incidents.
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Topic: Battlebots Thread: ABC Season 2 begins 6/23/2016 (Read 12206 times)