Dragon Con Bot Blitz

Dragon Con is (technically) still going on, and Robot Battles microbattles was yesterday. I already planned on bringing Cake and DDT, but Charles, Xo, Aaron, and I decided a fleet of "Assbots" were in order. By this time it was Friday the 2nd. Isn't Robot Battles on Sunday?

Charles was nice enough to donate an old Pop Quiz frame with some motors still attached. Remove weapon motor, blade, receiver and escs, as well as one motor. Three drive motors, a sturdy frame, and a dead 4-cell lipoly. This could work.

I left my shop camera at the apartment, but the result was pretty clear.

Introducing, Prop Quiz 0.5: waaaay too light.

Seriously, that is a 3 blade prop designed for baby helichoppers. Does it fly?

YES.

Unfortunately, it had some issues expressing flight in practice.



Xo and Aaron designed a melty style robot, where the entire frame rotates to give a 100% weapon mass.

And this is how that venture went:



Looks like it would have been pretty dangerous if it was made of metal or plastic and NOT WOOD. Seriously, the only piece of material we could find Saturday evening was a 3/4" block of wood. We decided to waterjet a pocketed frame that housed all the electronics. It also weighed approximately 1lb,5oz for a 3 pound class. I just wished it had hit the opponent instead of the wall.

And here is Charles' assbot, "$20,000 per year Enjeering Degree". Of course, the robot is in the arena, not the person on the left.

A resurrected sumobot back when speed hacked servos were still valid methods of power transmission. It also had a fair number of trinkets and symbolism: "the hand is symbolic of begging for money and the weight of student loans; the duct tape wrapped around the galvanized roof flashing is representative of the challenges students face in pursuit of fulfilling their engineering degree requirements; the threaded rod represents front-end ballast mass."

The serious business robots put on a great show as usual. DDT threw robot guts all about the arena and Cake probably threw a roof shot or two. Both robots were removed by Thomas Kenny's robots, who are great in design and quick as usual. The flaws in my robots were the same as usual, and I'll probably not fix them as well.

[rumble video]

So what's next? This upcoming Saturday is the Mini Maker Fair hosted by our very own Georgia Tech Invention Studio/Maker's Club. This means this week will be yet another hectic blitz to put together the scooter I hope to feature along with Charles' equipment. Be there if you can! We promise over 60 different exhibitors, a far greater turnout than expected.