Team Jeopardy: Endeavour

[Mega Masher]

Btw sam, you'll have to repaint mini e's scoop yellow now :P

[Team Invade]

Yes that's exactly why Annihilation's motors are still in the cases When it was first built we thought it was the biggest bodge on the robot but in seven years it must be the only part that hasn't broken yet! It also helps because the whole thing is held in by rubber straps which helps to absorb shocks quite a lot.

I thought about doing the same for Combustion but decided against it. Main problem is that it makes the whole drive setup a lot bigger than "proper" mountings do and I wanted to make the robot as small as possible. The aluminium mounts look a lot nicer as well

[SamO]

right then, update time again....

Well, what can I say? What a cracking weekend at the Gadget Show live and what an unexpected and destructive (+ a bit controversial) set of fights there were too. Well done to all the winners, Tom with Wedgie for the Gladiator, Alex with Tiny Toon for the Annihilator, Team Beast for the 1st + 2nd and of course Ellis for his magnificent 3rd place. That really was the biggest shock (pleasing) of the event for me

Any way, in terms of Endeavour's efforts, Meh.... not too bad. Didn't do too badly in the main comp, lost its first fight by being flipped out by Explosion within the first 30 seconds or so. We then had Killer Joule and Devils Coach Horse, we got 4 points from this as Joule got beached and then DCH got beached after we bent their front scoop. Our 3rd fight was against Defector and Massacre. We knocked Massacres link out and then won the match on a judges decision to get 3 points. Lastly we had our fight against NST and Keizer. We were doing really well and taking the hits like a tank, and then we got spun off into the pit by an NST hit, so only got 1 point from that fight. I think we could have taken more hits but yeah, that ain't gona happen when you're in the pit. Over all then we got 9 points, one off from qualifying which is the exactly the same as we got last year :'( Some pics of the bot below:

Endeavour with spinner food attached (worked really well):


Damage from the NST fight:


The state of the spinner food after the champs:


Now then, we experienced our first strip-down and rebuild at an event this weekend, we burnt out a motor . First problem for Endeavour in over a year, luckily we had no more competition fights left to do so we had plenty of time to swap for a new one and the job was done in 2 hours or so. Because of the burn out, we decided to not put it in for any more white boards and just enter it in the Gladiator event as we knew the other side was going to go soon.

In the actual Gladiator fight we were going really well, looking strong dealing with the spinners and putting LH3 in the pit. We were then left with Wedgie, Ricochet and us. We were battling it out for about 3 minutes and then my motor burnt out again leaving us spinning on one wheel and magic smoke coming out of the lid, so yeah came third in that. Once we had opened her up to have a peek inside, we were first met by a unique smell that now fills our garage, but we also found that the motor that had been replaced was the one that had burnt out.... suspiciously! Pics of the burnt out motor:



The race is now on to fix it and get ready for Burgess Hill in a couple of weeks, it can be done!

Ps: We also had some new Hardox corners made by Mario, who has done a great job again. Also, if anyone has any videos of Endeavours fights, can you post them on here please? Cheers

[SamO]

Little bit of an update:

Picked up the Migatronic TIG welder from my friends house yesterday, which I posted about in another thread. £250 which I didn't think was to bad! Just got to get the gas, filler rods and a fewer other bits and bobs and we're ready start welding. Expect to see some pictures of some crudely joined metal on here soon.

Also, we're just about the buy the parts for the next FW. In doing so, I cam across something deeply disturbing! It would appear as though TZ85's are out of stock and have been so for the past month or so.... which is a bit concerning. Any body know anything about this?!?!

[RogueTwoRobots]

I noticed that too when I was on the website the other day. The UK warehouse has 'In Transit' written next to it but I don't know if that means more are due in shortly.

To be fair, between Botbitz and people buying their own to hack, we've probably depleted the world's stock levels. Either that or Turnigy have noticed the spike in sales and are wondering 'what the hell is going on here?'

[SamO]

Major Update Time!!!!!

A lot of stuff is happening here at the team jeopardy workshop. Ummm, where to start? Well, we picked up the gas for the welder a few weeks ago so we've had a go at that... with surprisingly good results:





Not to bad for some of my first few welds, picked up a massive sheet of mild steel from our local fabricators that were going to cut up and weld together just for the sake of practise. Also, those massive disgusting craters are where we tested the welder with out argon, so the metal all oxidised. Just did that to check the welder was working probably after about 25 years sat in a garage

Next we moved on to doing some more TZ85 programing. Some of you may have seen that we did Craig's ESC and whilst we were at we did two for ourselves as well. We bought one of those flash tools off of Hobby King as we thought it would make the whole process a bit quicker. To our surprise when we got it out the packet, we discovered that there was a 10 pin idc connector on the end of it as opposed to the 6 pin on our programmer. This led to us doing a lot more work on this than expected as we had to cut of the connector on the flash tool, test to see which six wires were actually being used and then do some crazy soldering to link it all to a six pin connector. The result was this:



Next, doing a little upgrade on Endeavour by putting a gyro in it. This should make it more controllable than it is at the moment as well giving the potential for dad to drive it

Finally, the new feather! Parts have started arriving for it. Got the weapons system, the motors-gearboxes, wheels, ESC's and ordered some metal off John the other day. A quick pic of the bane bots order:



Four 775 motors, two 16-1 gearboxes, four wheels and some other bits and bobs. Ended up having to pay £40 duty tax which I was wasn't too happy about but as soon as I opened the box all was forgotten :P

Going to start knocking up the wooden model tomorrow, and then I've got to spend some more money :'( Oh well, after all it is designed to be spent LOL!!! Oooo, and for any one remotely, at all interested, the new machine is going be called "Intrepid" and should be ready for the champs next year (maybe.....).

Cheers for reading

Edit: Bit of a photo spam... soz!

[harry hills]

10/10 would read again lol. More photo spam next update please

[SamO]

LOL glad you enjoyed reading it haz ! I shall try my hardest with the pictures next time

[daveimi]

What type of robot is the new one going to be? A pusher?

[Revsmin]

Finally, the new feather! Parts have started arriving for it. Got the weapons system

Read the post.

[SamO]

yer, going to have a weapon

[Andy]

Looks great Sam and whatever weapon it has, its bound to be decent with that good reliable drive

[SamO]

Update Time!!!!!

We went to Bluewater a few weeks ago with Endeavour... it didn't end well!!!!! Managed to survive an impressive 2 fights before one of the motors burnt out, killing the robot and ending our fun for the weekend Didn't bother going on the Sunday as we had no replacements. Took the motor apart and discovered the fan had melted (again) and then snapped off one of the brushes. The picture below should show it better:


So after this, Endeavour has had some serious TLC. The 14.4v 550's have been swapped out for some 18v 755's!:


To make this fit we had to file out some holes in the bulkhead and then set up some extra mounting to support the larger motor, nothing too major. The new motor pod looked like this (the one on the right):


Then when they were both fitted in the robot, it looked like this. You can see the new filter we are experimenting with to try and keep the motor cool. Its just the dust filter off a vacuum cleaner. Wouldn't be surprised if it began to melt but worth a shot I guess:


Lastly, the gyro. It has finally been successfully installed after quite a bit of hassle. Thanks to Dave Weston for selling it to us :


So that's Endeavour ready for Gloucester next weekend. Ohhh, and the build on the new bot will get underway soon, just waiting on the metal from Jon to get started.

Cheers

[shakesc]

Nice drill motors, what drills are you stripping down for those?

[SamO]

Makita's