The Unnamed (FW)

[Eventorizon]

Looking very good! Lifter is a little on the slow side but that's it really, maybe slanting the sides if you plan on going against spinners.
Given you have the lifter to control, I would go with single stick steering and then spend time practising your driving, that way you are not trying to raise the lifter and occidentally turn out from under your opponent

[harry hills]

Best new feather I've seen in a long time. Why powder coating though?

[Ellis]

Agreed, one of the nicest new feathers I've seen. It looks like you've been doing this for years. Well done! Look forward to seeing it in person sometime.

[Eventorizon]

The next FW 'competition' I believe is Gadget Show Live 2016, the full combat marathon of an event over 4 days! But there are regular HW events that you can attend with your FW and test it out in the melee's they have between HW fights. This is a good way of finding flaws in the designs so you can iron them out before you get to the champs next year.

[maddox10]

Next for us is the GRA event. The German competiton. It's full combat.
Saturday is comp. Sunday is games and testing after repairs.

[Pinski1]

Thanks guys!

Powder coating is largely a 'just because' Seemed like it would give a decent finish and be fairly tough. I may just default to Black Hammerite spray though.

I have been doing this for years! The first GR02's were delivered on 02/09/2013!

Is it bad I've already started designing v2? There's quite a lot architecturally wrong with this robot that requires a re-thinking and re-design. I also want to fight with it first just to shake out any further problems that I may have missed.

The next fight I can see will be the Hackspace Robot Wars at the beginning of August and then I'm going to be in German for the Chaos Communications Camp in late August.

[Pinski1]

I'm going to be giving a talk on building (designing) combat robots at Chaos Communications Camp in Germany next week and for practice I gave it at my local hackerspace Makespace in Cambridge. You can see the slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation...it?usp=sharing

Enjoy!

[Pinski1]

Long time no post!

I had lots of fun fighting The Unnamed at WEEE Chester. I missed the first fight as no one posted what time I was meant to turn up! I managed to get in the 3 other rumbles.

I had some problems with my minimal ground clearance, the heavies dent the floor and leave plenty of MDF flakes around, all of which wedge my wheels off of the ground! I also had some difficulty with the pit not being 100% flush with the rest of the arena floor.

Seeing as there were 4 robots in total, 2 of which were flippers I spent quite a bit of time upside down. The robot ran fine but flipping forwards/backwards in my head proved to be a lot more complicated!

When I did manage to get The Unnamed into position and tried to use the lifter I found that by the time I'd got it to raise the lifter everyone had cleared off.

Another thing was that 2 of the zip-ties holding my speed controllers had snapped due to shock damage, a quick and simple fix but it's worth looking into a more robust fixing method for the long term.

I also suffered my first bit of damage! The house robot gave mine a big boop on the head which ended up leaving a large crack in my top armour polycarbonate! No other physical damage and the polycarbonate is otherwise okay. I probably won't replace it straight away, maybe in a few events time.

Things I want to change after this are:

• Bigger & Better wheels - I have the parts but ran out of time before this event.
• A Better lifter - this means a better motor but also better controls.
• Tweak the mixer to have an invert switch to swap forwards/backwards.
• Replace the blade fuse with an electronic fuse and XT90 connector.

I'm learning loads about how robots stand up to being thrown around in the arena and how to make them better. These changes hopefully will be the last changes I make to this design before I move on to the next design. As I've said before this robot was designed before I'd actually physically seen anyone's robot and has some major flaws that can't be fixed easily. Also, I want to build another one!

[RogueTwoRobots]

Those sorts of events are great for shaking down a robot and finding out its strengths and weaknesses. I've often taken more damage at these events from being flipped and battered all round than at full combat events!