Richie: The £50, 3 week Featherweight

[daveimi]

Glad you've got it sorted and think you should build a beetle

[Rapidrory]

I did; I had Bork in the Beetle competition at the weekend, and it even won a fight! :P


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Nah, I'm going to build a "serious" (or as near to serious as I get) beetle soon hopefully; got all the parts, just not all at at uni so'll have to wait until at least the easter holiday.

[daveimi]

Oh wow do you mean at the feather and heavy event you went to

[Rapidrory]

Yeah; the Beetle arena was there and we had a bit of a tournament in the break between the shows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKzz...1Vj9zjdKmF3txv

[Rapidrory]

Just finished off the new ESC for Richie: ~150A per motor at up to 40V (though the capacitor ratings limit it to 25v atm), with a total build cost of £7 for components.. Should be good enough for driving drill motors :P

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[razerdave]

Excellent work Rory .

[Rapidrory]

Well, due to a last minute entry to the champs, Richie has had to undergo a quick rebuild.

Installed and debugged the new ESC, rebuilt and reprogrammed the lifter circuitry to be more robust.

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Fitted some new tires as the last lot where shredded. Now running Dunlop slicks which should grip well on the metal floor:

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Bent the lifter mounts back straight and refitted all the constituent parts, and I suddenly have a working robot :L

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Also removed some of the top armour as it was all cracked, didn't do all that much, and added weight; I think it's roughly a kilo under now, but I'm not sure as I don't have any accurate scales..

I await it's inevitable destruction on Thursday.. :L

[Rapidrory]

Well, seeing as the 2015 champs are now over, I feel I should give a bit of an update:

I changed a few things at the last minute before I left; I removed the self righting bar as I found that without the domed top it self righted fine without it once I'd stuck a little horn on one side just to help it over. This meant I could put the top armour back on and stop it looking quite as ridiculous. It was looking a little dull though so I stuck a large robot sticker on it, along with it's name tag and then was good to go :L

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The whole event went much better than expected. My draw was very lucky, meaning It was mostly spinner free bar my second fight. I won the first fight against Flow and Endeavour on a judges decision (although on watching back the video I'm not sure I entirely deserved that win), after which my homemade ESC died whilst testing before the next fight for as yet unknown reasons. I borrowed a pair of TZs of Dave Weston (cheers Dave!) and was good to go again.
My next fight was against Catharsis and Binky, although Binky was destroyed in it's first fight so it was a 1v1 with Catharsis... Several chunks and one of the lifting forks were removed from Richie before being promptly ejected from the arena, however since Binky didn't enter the fight I still got second place.
Bodged in a new lifting fork and was good to go for my third fight with Twisted Sister and Hardwired 2 (Aka, Banana Bot). Won this fight by knockout, putting me on 9 points with one fight to go. This meant I only had to come second against Boneyard and Wedgie to qualify to the final 18..
Boneyard's drive failed almost immediately, meaning I just had to stay in the arena for 10 seconds to qualify.. however with just 2 seconds to go, Wedgie threw me out. I don't think anyone else missed out on qualifying by such a painfully small margin, so I've unofficially awarded myself ~19th place out of the 51 bots there.. Not bad considering my one aim when I arrived was not to be last :P

Throughout it all, Richie performed brilliantly; It didn't let me down at all during fights until it's final whiteboard where one wheel came detached.. I think this is the main reason I was able to do well, as so many robots just broke down due to reliability reasons, whereas Richie just kept on going. Self righting was also so much better now, and I didn't end up in the pit once if I remember correctly :L

The whole event was hugely enjoyable, and I'm very glad I went along. Everybody seemed to like Richie's rustic style, and it was great to see that Richie was actually a much better robot than I give it credit for. Will definitely be back next year if I can, hopefully with an improved Richie and possibly a similarly rustic drum spinner I'm planning on calling 'Scrattler' :L Huge thank you to everyone there for making it a great few days.

I've now repaired the worst of the damage, and plan to be at Burgess Hill this weekend with Richie and Big Nuts.