To Bot or not to Bot...

... that is the question.

Today is Tuesday and this Saturday is the Gulf Coast Robotic Sports competition hosted by the Hobby Marketplace. I am still trying to decide if I will compete or not. I love to fight robots, but somewhere between losing $30 (in entry fees) and my parents wanting to take me to my driver's test, it makes me second guess. Either way, I am still preparing the robots for Dragon Con in August.

First up, is my Antweight, DDT. At BARF, he did a good amount of damage, but after 5-6 competitions hte parts are wearing down. The motor mounting blocks actually fractured and broke completely on one side; into 5 pieces to be exact. I could not let this happen again.



Here are the UHMW motor mounts I created. Same overall dimensions, but the different material should make it more shock resistant. And yet, I didn't use them.




Here is what I actually did. I bought some standoffs to hold hte top armor, and then simply glued hte motors down like in some realier robots. It looks cheesy, but has actually been the best method in my opinion. No motors broken, and never has a motor come lose. It is just a pain to fix if a gear explodes.



Pacman got a weapon system change. When I got my wisdom teeth removed, I swung by the surplus store and bought some tighter O-rings so the weapon couldnt spin up faster. A lack of friction was costing Pacman some good seconds. But the O-rings were too tight. They transfered all the friction and the darn Wattage Cobalt actually sucked all of the current from the batteries. Ugg, I need another solution.

Easy solution. I changed the ratio of hte belts. The old setup was somewhere around 3:1. Decent, but for more torque, I made the blade pulley larger. Now it has something around a 7:1 ratio. This will mean lower top speed, but really, I never even GOT to top speed at BARF. Recent tests show that this configuration is a solid idea anyway.

Last, is P150. I have never introduced P150 here before, but simply it is hte smallest robot of the fleet. A 1/3 scale of DDT in a sense, definately one of hte most dangerous Fariweights in the nation.

It is in pieces... See the pretty pile of parts? Last GCRS, I foolishly put it in the Antweight rumble, where it made lots of pretty sparks, but it smashed both of its drive motors and its weapon motors. I already fixed one drive motor, but the bearing retainers on the weapon and the casing on the second drive motor are poo.




More updates to come later. And oh, the videos from the last event are uploaded on my Youtube. Cheers!