Team Death - New Heavyweight

[team death]

After protracted tinkering with the castors on the Robot this weekend in
an attempt to cure the steering problem I decided to bite the bullet and
do a job I have been putting off from almost week 5 of the build, namely
level up the wheels at the back -not an easy task.
But first some news to follow on from last weeks diary-I managed to fix
the reducer sprocket fault and widen the distance between the driven
chains to good degree and its probably the best its ever been.

Before I started on the Robot today I had a trip to the car boot sale
and picked up some bargains-4 cordless drills in a shopping bag for
£1, which I want to use for a fun project later in the year.
On the way back home my car started to overheat so I had to attend
to this before today's bot build.

Adam was unavailable this week due to attending a tournament in
London so I took on the wheel leveling challenge on my own.
This was a major dismantling job, I first removed the drive chain
and the chain to the winch then I removed the winch and the very
awkward bolts holding the wheel bearings in place and finally the
wheels.
It was quite interesting to view parts of the robot that hadn't seen
light of day for a year, so that was a bonus.
Due to the confined space it wasn't possible to modify the frame of
the robot so I fitted modified bearings and bolted the whole wheel
assembly back together.
The results were very pleasing-not only does the robot look more level
it also seemed to sit better on the floor when been pushed around-
as previously it would lift one of its tyres off the ground from time to
time.
Will this help with the drive?-we shall find out next week.
I'm looking at polo shirts with the idea of having the team death
logo and name printed on them........nearly there

[Redirect Left]

Another week has past us by...

This weekend we started by trying to hookup the weapons electrics. This has been done in steps beforehand, but its never been permanently wired in, and our first immediate problem was that there was only one neutral wire, whereas we had previously added an extra live cable from a junction box in the past. So the first thing to do was to wire up another of these to serve the weapon motor. This didn't take too long to rectify, and there are now two junction boxes in the machine, one carrying splits for red, and the other for black cables. They're neatly tucked away along with one of the fuses, and with a good amount of metal between it and any weapons.
r1qC82osdb.jpg
We then went to test the weapon mechanism, and found an issue, in that the TX/RX combination Colin has, doesn't seem to have enough oomph to fully and reliably trigger the weapon mechanism in its current state, this can be resolved by using a different channel on the RX/TX, however that specific channel doesn't appear to have a fail safe 'revert to 0' situation for when signal is lost, where as the others do. This may fall foul of some events regulations, so we switched to the backup RX/TX that I had brought up to test things with a few week ago. We found that this one did correctly control the weapon mechanism to begin with, and more importantly, also has proper fail safes active for the channel we are using on the controller. This may mean we have to fall back to this one to use until we can find a better solution.

Over the week, Colin had made some further adjustments, including the introduction of some running wheels to the rear of the bot. This will make sure the wheels are knocked against nothing too bad, should they be subjected to a hard hit, instead some harmless wheels will run along them instead.
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We ended by having an off-the-ground test of the motors, just to ensure the wiring changes hadn't broken anything, and to discharge the batteries somewhat. Which all went well thankfully.

The bot, The Mean Machine, has been registered with the event in Grantham soon, waiting to hear back from that, so it may be not too long before its first fight!

[team death]

Damage report this week, Yes we finally got to our first event with the MEAN MACHINE
and what a roller coaster experience it was down at Grantham.
I had been putting in a bit of a night shift through the week to try to get the Robot
ready but there were still a few tasks to do down at the Grantham event.
Adam had brought a new set of batteries with him but the lead ends were different
to the ones we had on the Robot so the first job was for Adam to solder new bullet
connectors on and that was fairly straight forward and after a bit of a re-wire on
the weapon by a Froggy team member.
I turned my attention to the fail safe on the weapon-I set the failsafe in the transmitter
which looked good on the relay and Adam called a crew member for a tech check.
unfortunatley the fail safe failed to activate on the drive and then weapon fired and
blew a fuse-failed tech check 1.
Adam thought the error was in my transmitter after I had altered the settings so we
tried Adams spare Flysky.
After a second tech check all seemed good apart from the blown fuse so we decided
to use the Bot as a ram bot for the first fight as time was now short.
Adam had had a look at white board and we were in the competition proper up agaisnt
Robot Wars series 8 winner Apollo and Earthquake by team shock.
Adam and I decided that I would drive first and made a large circle bashing into
the other Robots in the pre fight display.
I talked to Adam about holding the centre ground so I Headed straight for the middle
of the Arena-I think Apollo had all ready flipped Earthquake by then so Apollo headed
my way, the most memorable part for me was when I drove up the the flipper of
Apollo and got a mighty flip before I could drive off the deep end.
The flip must have lifted the Bot five feet in the air but the Robot kept going-
we didnt quite last three minutes-more like one and half and we were eventually
immobilised by a protective rear flap pushing against the wheel.
We got the Robot fight ready for the mele at the end and met series 10 RW
winners in there-Eruption amongst other great flippers.
Here's a list of the Damage..........

Rear tyre flap protector ripped off
polycarbonate side panel broken off
Rc receiver batteries ripped out
Large chunk of foam ripped out of Tyre
Other tyre badly split
Front shovel bent upwards
weights bar ripped from bodywork
Chest expander springs ripped off
Winch webbing and hook torn from winch
Chain for reducer sprocket has come off.

I have yet to check the Esc (The Cytron) and the batteries but I hope to try it out
next week.

[Redirect Left]

I have a few images from today, showing some of the damage.

When we arrrived, we were one of the first ones there, so plenty of table choice.
IMG_20180623_150316.jpg
We believe the huge chunk out of this tyre was caused by the house robot. Although i'm not sure what happened to the other one that formed huge cracks. One thing for sure is, if we had gone with airfilled tyres, we'd have been out a bit quicker, and solid tyres seemed to go better here.
IMG_20180623_203453.jpgIMG_20180623_203333.jpg
The welding came off the top of one of the spikes, unsure how, but it may have been the forces involved when the bot was flipped into the air and came back down with a thud.
IMG_20180623_203345.jpg
A front on shot after the 2 fights, with the return springs from the jaws completely loose.
IMG_20180623_203312.jpg

Overall, the bot maintain its shape, and to my knowledge, we only lost two parts, a bit of metal around the wheel protection, and the receiver batteries flew out, but they were not secured down to begin with. We'll try to get rid of the batteries and see if the ESC can power the transmitter, it should do anyway, with its own little 5V output.

It was a hugely fun day, and I'll certainly be eager to take part in another live event when the bot is fixed up and refitted somewhat. It also seems to have given me the itch to go out and make more bots...

[team death]

Post match ESC and lipo batteries review.....
So after two flipping tough battles down at Grantham how did the ESC
and batteries hold up?.
The Cytron ESC is probably the most expensive part in the Robot and
some veteran Roboteers were concerned about the cooling fans not holding up
against the G forces you will encounter in a battle situation.
With that in mind we designed the protection for the ESC to a high spec as
detailed in the build diary previously.
The ESC was not held down in the Robot by screws or any fasteners, it was
just squashed subtly between pieces of foam the holding box and the heavy
duty lid, this has the effect of taking out any shock waves from the ESC.
So after reviving the receiver batteries by soldering the wires back on-
these ended up on the Arena floor for at least a minute I tested the ESC.
The verdict is it's still in perfect working order
The Lipo batteries had a similar protection spec-behind two layers of shielding
including 8 mm polycard and 3mm steel box section and cushioned by foam.
The verdict-undamaged and both batteries reading 15 .6 volts.
overall very pleased, though there's at least a couple of weekend repairs to
get the Mean Machine battle ready to previous spec or even more for improved
modifications.
For anyone who went down to Grantham -spot yourself on this video from
Sunday?-we were gone by Sat eve-never mind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znuJRNjACYo&t=221s

[team death]

Epilogue -The Mean Machine build is effectively finished so I thought I would
tidy up any loose ends.
Grantham was a blast and the Robot suffered minor damage overall and I
have all ready repaired some of that damage.
We want to get to other events soon but we will repair and improve the
Mean Machine at our leisure and as repairs don't constitute Build-it's sadly
the end for this thread .

[Theo]

Here here! Though a regular fixture of my Sundays is now gone

You've made an amazing comeback, you and Adam. I remember when it was an unwelded pile of metal, now look at what you've achieved. I wish you the best of luck with The Mean Machine and more! Well done