We had a trip out to Ferry Fair recently. It was great seeing all of the display robots and having a chance to fight with my dad's antweight! Here is some footage taken at the event.
Our trip to Robodojo earlier this month highlighted a few issues that needed to be resolved. Most of these problems were to do with the weapon assembly, which had way too much flex and caused us to lose the weapon in our first fight. Also, the 3D printed parts were PLA at the event (uh oh) so they needed to be re-printed in TPU with a slight redesign for some parts. The fork mounts needed a way to stop the forks rotating under the robot like they did in York, and the weapon spacing needed to be increased. After looking at different companies that could print what we needed, we decided that it would be easier (and probably more cost efficient) if we bought our own 3D printer and TPU filament. This also opens up a lot of opportunities for printed antweight and beetleweight chassises. The first step for improving the weapon was to move the weapon bulkheads outwards and extend them backwards to the piece that separates the drive motors from the rest of the robot. We changed the ...
Because the Robodojo events have an antweight competition along with the beetleweights, we decided to make a couple of ants to take to the next event. These follow the same theme and colours as Exposure, but are a little less competitive and more of a chance to try new things and make robots that are fun to fight. However, I still wanted to make a spinner. So I thought for a long time about how I could make a spinner that would be entertaining, but not too serious, and I eventually settled on a 4WD large undercutter design. The plan was to make the chassis as small as possible but make the weapon as LARGE as possible. The actual chassis footprint is only about 80 x 65mm! This was printed in PLA+ with 2 walls and 30% infill, which feels nice and strong. It also runs on 3S LiPo because why not, and uses a 2700KV 1806 motor to power the weapon. This gives a theoretical tip speed of 319mph, or 34,000 rpm with the largest weapon. Also, due to the battery voltage, we couldn't use the ty...
More Progress A lot of progress has been made recently, most notably the pieces have been cut from black HDPE and assembled fully. The weapon motor has been mounted, and a mock weapon has been cut from a spare piece of plastic. It was quite easy making the final pieces, as we already knew the exact dimensions and how everything needed to fit together so it was just a matter of carefully cutting all the pieces and then screwing them together. Then we assembled the weapon stack. This consists of a 40mm pulley, with 4 M4 bolts running through it and through the weapon, which has bearings pushed into a 12mm central hole, and then the bolts screw into a plate with M4 nuts pushed into it. Then a 6mm shoulder bolt runs through all of this, plus the weapon bulkheads, and finishes with a nylock nut. BBB Brawl I was lucky enough to take a trip to the recent BBB Brawl event, and was even more fortunate that I could participate in whiteboard fight after the main competition! I was in a fight with ...
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