Northern England & Scotland event startup

[Ocracoke]

Wouldn't beating a beetle be insanely difficult? I know that's the point? But holy smokes...

Well they did beat Mr Cats Mouse House so anything is possible Wouldn't like to enter 10 AWs as a cluster BW though

[Redirect Left]

To be fair, I suspect Robot Wars (new and old) used manually controlled hazards and triggers - with pretty front ends, eg; the dial of doom
All hazards and even the pit release triggered at spontaneous times, there where times when a heavyweight tapping on the pit release tyre didn't hit it hard enough to trigger, and then later on the mini bot of Nuts managed to sink Behemoth after triggering it flawlessly and releasing the pit. The flipper and spikes also didn't have regular patterns to trigger them, and seemed to randomly decide when to activate - so i hypothesize these too are manually triggered, and don't detect something like weight above them.

RE: automatic triggering for things
It's probably not worth going to the effort of adding lots of little switches and stuff to automatically trigger things, if you have an unbiased person able to trigger them manually (and preferably be less biased than whatever was triggering Robot Wars' stuff)

RE: concern of breaking buttons;
If the automatic triggering was done however, you can get very resilient buttons - think of all the abuse arcade machines receive, yet can last decades. If you have a nice frontage to the button, that'll take the impact of everything and not the technology hidden behind it all - this also contributes to arcade machines longevity, the pretty plastic button frontage taking the hits, not the little tech behind it. I've done a few arcade repair contracts, when those machines fail, it's nearly always old batteries on the motherboard rupturing, or a kid spilt something on the top and the water resistant seal has been broken through old age. Very rarely broken buttons.

RE: house robots - seems a neat idea. Although in practise adds more cost, especially for bettleweight and upwards sizes. May be cheaper to purchase a retiring bot and repurpose it for the cause.

this is something that'll need to start out super small, and grow to meet expectations and demand later on, rather than splashing out on the first one, i think?

[team death]

If your going to treat this concept as a hobby or if your budget is limited, it's
probablty best to start small.
I remember doing my first live event at jonnos with The Wall in about 2003/4
and his arena was very small, about 20 ft square I think.
If you are going to run it as a business and having your hobby as your business
can be very gratifying, you might want to invest a little bit more money at the start
and go modular so you can build on what youve got.

I had one idea-portable Market stalls-they are a ready made frame work and you could
start with one as your first arena-with polycarb sides and then as you expand you could
just add more side by side,I have experience with Market stalls and they would be ok
up to feather weights in my opinion-of course your main strenghth would be how you
brace it with polycarb or other methods

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I'm not sure how strong the metal in portable market stalls and similar are.

Here is a random entry from eBay; https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/162097443058
It'd naturally need holes adding to connect the polycarb up to, but i suspect they're hollow thin tubes of metal, i'm not sure how they'd stand up to anything serious. I suspect the metal is similar to that used in metal sweepers or clothing line props - which would make sense, as out in the field it's only holding up the bit of flimsy rain defending tarpaulin.#
Something like that would certainly make a decent start point for an arena, if the metal proves strong enough to hang up there.
Similarly, i'm thinking of trying to acquire some scrap scaffolding, and see if they can be made into good frames for beetleweight and higher arenas. Shouldn't be too expensive for just a few pieces to muck about with and try a few things - even if it doesn't work for holding together polycarb walls. I'll definitely use them for featherweight and beetleweight arenas, as they'll make a decent internal wall between arena and polycarb, to make sure the robots can't come into direct contact except in a flip scenario.

[team death]

Adam I saw this great example of a show tent/gazebo on e bay 6 metres x 3
about twice the size of the one I demonstrated and it all fit into a slightly larger
bag-they do deliver too
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Red-Garde....c100290.m3507

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I've added that to my watch list for further down the line. I'm going to put together a list of stuff I definitely want to get into the first event, and work out the cost of that, before I start adding in things i'd merely like to see there, so I know what the budget is going to have to look like - then how much extra for the little niceities that can really make it something.

I live near to a junkyard, so I might have a pop by and fish out some varying metals, and see what works better for varying purposes. The companies i had been mailing regarding building arenas stopped responding, so I'll see the realistic possibility of building one from scratch for beetleweights / featherweights, before getting back to them - as I find it very frustrating when companies you're trying to legitimately seek services from end up just not responding.

I have a meeting with someone later in the week who is also interested in starting events in the area, so whilst at the moment i'm not sure exactly what will come of that, hopefully that will push everything closer to fruition.
As always, I'd welcome any further input, or even a message from people also interesting in helping out to any degree.

[joebrown]

Hi Adam!

Good to see people being pro-active up North
I started the Bristol Bot Builders group and we've done our first event here now - it was in a pub (the video Michael linked with the boss fight )

I'd recommend starting a facebook group (if you can bare facebook) as people seem to engage there quite a bit. And so far venue wise, pubs seem to be the most willing to be free venues for us (bonus of a bar serving booze

Arena wise, we've been using Bristol uni's arena but we're building our own ant arena for £300ish. I know that Sheffield uni have an ant arena and Leeds uni have a larger-than-beetle arena for their 5kg bots. Also there's definitely a beetle arena owner up north I've heard! Definitely worth asking em all!

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So what I can say right now is, there are definitely things being planned around the Yorkshire area for within the next 4-6 month. Regardless of my involvement or not in them - so there is always that to look forward to. I believe the upcoming events will be detailed by the people behind them in the not too distant future.

Hopefully I'll also be helping out with them, and if not. I may also still do my own events. Funding and interest permitting.