Team Kaizen Build Diary

[Ocracoke]

Jibril
I finally found the motivation to work on this one again. The chassis has been fiddled with to get the new axe motor ready for installation and as part of that, I've been soldering up a Vex BB controller for it and adding in a coupler from the drive wiring to the weapon. Much to my initial confusion, the Vex doesn't supply its own 5v power to the receiver but some extensions to the drive receiver and a cut middle wire and it works OK now, just need calibration to dial it in.

Otherwise, with all the major soldering work done and chassis work pretty much complete barring some extra underside reinforcement, the next stage is to get the weapons gearbox box built. This, in theory, is a simple affair but as my previous attempts at building axe gearboxes have shown, it'll either work fine or be a slippy slippy mess. At least it drives fine... I think? :P Definitely needs tidying up in there but when the internal space of each side is smaller than a A4 sheet of paper, I think I am doing OK for something in development.

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(Yes, those wires running across the centre will be covered).

[McMullet]

Great job on motivating yourself Lucy! That looks great, very satisfyingly packed into place.

[Ocracoke]

Heh, thanks Sam. I need to grab a 12mm drill bit for the next stage which I'll try and get during the week. The main body needs some study reinforcement for the gearbox to slot into. I've hoped to try and give the robot a proper test drive this weekend but the weather put paid to that and the rest of this week doesn't look very nice either.

In all fairness, the gearbox really shouldn't take too long to do. There'll need to be metal plates to reinforce certain areas but honestly, it shouldn't be hard. "Shouldn't" she says...

[Roboteernat]

Looking good Lucy! A bit of aluminium U channel will cover those wires nicely.

[Ocracoke]

Good idea, thanks Nat! I'll see if I can grab some when I get the drill bit. In the meantime, with an egregious amount of parts laying around, I've decided what I needed was another big project to use them with and with that, the revival of a name.

Kaizen
The 1.0 version of Kaizen was built in a bit of a rush for the first Middleweight Championships outside of Robot Wars for the 2018 Chatham event and realistically speaking, it barely qualified as being a Middleweight as it weighed 31.2kg. It was a 4WD machine, the only one I've ever built, powered by four Gimson 13.7:1 motors and was the first robot to feature a custom built gearbox of mine, a single stage 3:1 axe. Had it been built without the 4mm thick box steel and about half the fasteners removed, it'd probably qualify as a FW weight wise.

Yet despite all these flaws... and the fact the axe broke during the championship... it and was forever burning out motors (because when you are pumping 26.4v through 18v 775 motors, what did you expect?), it came 6th out of 8 in that championship that year. It didn't do very well at Cheltenham after that with it only competing in two matches where in both occasions, it refused to move smoothly and then was retired for Jibril.

Those of you who had been following my build diary will recall that originally, Kaizen was meant to have been a Heavyweight. I still have the original panels for that around (actually not too dissimilar to the current 2.0 version of Jibril in construction terms) but now knowing better, they were hilariously thin.

I do have big LiPo capacity batteries, a ESC, enough wiring, plugs and LEDs to do this with and soon a pair of motors so that is a start. I am still tossing it up in the air as to wherever to make Kaizen a MW again or a HW this time around though I want to try and keep the design fairly similar to the last version. I would like to be able to enter the Heavyweight championships but I have to realistically be able to shift this around on my own though this being the wonderful community that it is, that is rarely the case!

More details to follow...

[Ocracoke]

Kaizen
So my thoughts are the following:

• 4WD with a single gear reduction and 1/2" chain to get to 12:1 on 100mm wheels.
• A mix of Hardox, HDPE and Polycarbonate for the armour, like Jibril 2.0. I might use tapped square bar to attach the Hardox with the armour, would anyone know where I could get some?
• Similar sort of dimensions to the original version with it being taller for the weapon, a linear acutator powered arm with a removable saw or something for Robots Live! events.

Since Jibril is so close to completion, I won't be working on this until the new year though I might mess with CAD designs in the meantime.

[Roboteernat]

[B].... I might use tapped square bar to attach the Hardox with the armour, would anyone know where I could get some?...

Hi Lucy, I can machine tapped square bar if you need it.

[Ocracoke]

Oooooh excellent! I'll contact you when I am ready to get this started.

[Ocracoke]

Jibril
The Scythe gearbox is now partially assembled. The Victor BB I've been having a bit of trouble with getting calibrated but seem to have it nailed down now. The first stage is pretty much mocked up (I am planning to swap out the silver steel shafts for Grade 5 Titanium shafts since they did so well in holding up in the last version of Jibril at EXR Cheltenham 2019) but it needs a idler gear on the first stage to clear the main bulkheads of the robot.

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The original plan was to use a 120T and a 19T in two separate stages to get 39.88:1 reduction. However, despite my best efforts to CAD this up, the final stage 120T shaft doesn't quite clear the first stage 120T gear. This is despite this CAD drawing which suggests it should have cleared, albeit just...

Screenshot_2020-10-30_00-54-12.png

I dunno, I need more practice in this. In any case, I've picked up a 20T and a 22T to see if they'll clear it. I'll reuse the 19T gear in another project. The reduction in the ratio is 37.89:1 with the 20T so it isn't a great reduction in of itself, it just bugs me that I can't figure out why it seems to be out. Either way, the overlap is marginal so the 20T should work.

[Ocracoke]

Jibril
I picked up a 316 Stainless Steel 20mm shaft to mount the final output gear on as the Titanium shaft needs some machining to make fit the gear (it looks to be 0.5mm too thick) and finally have been able to drill the mount for the shaft. In a surprise, it turns out I hadn't drawn the CAD wrong, just what it looks like on screen threw me. The CAD drawing was tight, this is what it looks like with me holding the gear up before drilling the panel...

clearence.jpg

...and here is what it looks like roughly mounted, a 39.88:1 gear arrangement.

gears_roughly_mounted_900.JPEG

A test spin shows it all works so the next stage here is to get all the bearings mounted, get the other side of the carrier made and work out how to fix the gears on the shaft. The smaller gears have grub screws in them but the big gears are plain bores. Given that I am still planning to use Grade 5 Titanium with these steel gears, I imagine getting a key cut in the shafts and the gears itself would be the way forwards here?

[McMullet]

Looking great Lucy. Impressive bit of precision garage engineering to get those lined up so nicely!

[Ocracoke]

Aww, thanks Sam! I guess I just needed to have been a bit more brave with interpreting my diagram. Still having a bit of a nightmare with the shaft to get the bearings onto and I still need to figure out how to connect the gears to the shafts securely.

I've got some rear metal plates to go on the robot and working on getting the front plate made up along with a new Scythe-Axe. Bit of a long saga with them but my aim is to now have something battle ready by 2021.

[Ocracoke]

So... normally at the end of the year, I'd do a round up of the performance of the bots and the team in general. There really isn't much to say on the performance front. I attended the grand old sum of one event - Ant Freeze 6 - which I've already written about in a previous post so I'll cover what the statues of the robots are, what the plans for them are going forward and what is happening with BotFest.

Antweights - Amai, Ikari, Lafiel, Osu and Ramu
As I've mentioned before, Osu in its current form is now officially retired. I am sure I'll get around to rebuilding this one fairly soon, I've got some of the parts needed to do this. Ramu needs a new ESC which I've got one sitting around but it isn't the neat NanoTwo. It'll need a OrangeRX receiver to go with it.

Ikari remains pretty much as is though it now has a slightly thicker back plate with miniature wings on it so it won't end up on its side. Amai has some smaller wheels on it now and a PTFE wedge plate on the front for getting underneath opponents. It is still pretty scrappy but its held up fairly well given its really dodgy gluing :P Lafiel went under a rebuild but I found it was marginally too wide. I'll get around to rebuilding it again when time permits, all the electronics for that still work nicely.

Beetleweights - The Honey Badger and Shu!
The Honey Badger 4.0 has been looked at but hasn't had any repair work done since the 2019 BW championship. It needs at least new side panels out of black HDPE and a new wedge plate. Functionally, it seems to be fine. Shu! 2.0 was pretty much dismantled and will be rebuilt as Shu! 3.0 in a planned speed build challenge I am dreaming up.

Featherweights - Azriel
Poor old Azriel 1.0 hasn't seen any action at all this year despite a new axe mechanism being fitted and a tidy up of the wiring. I had hoped to go to RoboDojo with it in July but circumstances here changed to prevent that. My current line of thinking with that is to build a completely new Azriel 2.0 to take advantage of a new Scythe-Axe that I've now got (many thanks Jamie) coupled to a brand new gearing mechanism. The 1.0 version will then become a test bed for my brushless programmer tool which I talked about earlier on in the year.

Before that happens though, I am hoping to stage a fight with it facing the original Honey Badger 1.0. I found a ESC and some batteries, threw those on the original test chassis (from 2016/17!) and it runs, albeit without a weapon at the moment since the mount is still badly twisted. However, I argue it runs better than it did back in Grantham!

Middleweights - Jibril and Kaizen
Jibril 2.0 has been the most talked about thing in this build diary this year and it is coming along reasonably nicely. It needs a lot of the armour cutting and bolting onto it along with the new Scythe-Axe which I am currently in talks with someone to get cut for me. There is still a bunch of work to do on the carrier for the weapon to make it more secure than the 1.x versions in terms of securing gears to the shafts and so on but its coming along. I did a build video of the construction of the carrier as well :P

Kaizen I am planning to bring back next year with a ever growing parts collection here for it. Once Jibril 2.0 is done, I'll see about getting started with that.

BotFest
Oh boy... so as you may know, BotFest 4 was cancelled twice and, if being honest, the second time it was cancelled, that costed me financially. Of course, with the way things are at the moment, I can't say when it'll be back. I am *hoping* for a return anywhere from March onwards but I just can't say when that will be at the moment. Things aren't entirely standing still though, more to come on that later in 2021...

Miscellaneous
I've been dabbling with creating my own brushless ESC programmer as I think I alluded to earlier on in the year. Still working out some kinks in it but the general idea is to have something automatically create a suitable .hex file from the SimonK assembly files and then be able to flash that onto the ESC. I've had mixed results from it so far but when I've sorted the kinks out, I'll see about releasing it for everyone to try (provided you have a USBAsp programming tool).

[Redirect Left]

BotFest
Oh boy... so as you may know, BotFest 4 was cancelled twice and, if being honest, the second time it was cancelled, that costed me financially. Of course, with the way things are at the moment, I can't say when it'll be back. I am *hoping* for a return anywhere from March onwards but I just can't say when that will be at the moment. Things aren't entirely standing still though, more to come on that later in 2021...

Definitely can understand if you don't want to put a date on it until you know things are sure. With the way the pandemic is going, there's still no end in sight I would say. Definitely nothing where anyone can put a 'for sure' on things by then.

I will try to get another ant together before then, as I enjoyed BotFest 1 all the way back in [date here], hopefully I can arrive with something more better than the aptly named 'Send Help!'.

[McMullet]

Nice video! Jibril is looking awesome, really compact and mean-looking. One question though, could you possibly include a few more different types of fastener on the base plate? I think you might have missed one or two!

Oh boy... so as you may know, BotFest 4 was cancelled twice and, if being honest, the second time it was cancelled, that costed me financially. Of course, with the way things are at the moment, I can't say when it'll be back. I am *hoping* for a return anywhere from March onwards but I just can't say when that will be at the moment. Things aren't entirely standing still though, more to come on that later in 2021...

I'm really looking forward to making it to BotFest [some number]. Very happy to chip in a few quid to cover your costs!