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Thread: Shrapnel - Feather Vert Spinner

  1. #31
    INSOMNIA 63

    Shrapnel did a good at Insomnia this year! She went 5-1 in the competition, finishing top 8 again and dishing out some of the biggest hits of the event.



    You may notice that this year she had a brand new wedgelet:



    In response to the ever ongoing wedge war this is held down onto the floor by around 4.5kg of magnetic downforce. When I tested it in the arena it scraped the paint off of the brand new floor! Unfortunately it does increase the insert time for the disc, making it more difficult to hit consistently with it attached. Because of this I would only use it if I didn't think any other strategy would work, and since I never had a fight against something I didn't think I could either outwedge with the regular wide wedge or outmanoeuvre, I never had a chance to use it in combat

    My draw for the first round was certainly kinder than last year;
    Fight 1:
    Crabsolutely Clawful & Aegis Mk II
    Fight 2:
    Strix & Calabash Brothers
    Fight 3:
    Nigel Barrage & Orpheus

    Hardly last year's baptism of fire at the hands of Shard and Neon, but not a cakewalk either.

    Fight 1



    Upping the drive to 6S made the steering faster, but also made it gyro more than I was used to or comfortable with. This made lining up hits at the start tough, and I lowered the rates on the steering channel after the fight to 85% to be more in line with last year. Once I got a handle on it though I did some pretty nasty damage. The disc stops here because I clearly hadn't done enough to the link to stop it pulling out on a big impact like say, accidentally faceplanting the brand new Hardox floor?





    Luckily she drives beautifully and I could still take control of the fight with no weapon and win by KO

    Fight 2



    This one was the one that worries me the most, Calabash was a very nice looking vertical spinner that I thought could do some nasty damage if I let him. I put on the old wedge for this fight in anticipation of taking some damage, but as it happens I only took a small glancing blow. The last hit I landed on Calabash cleaved clean through the back of his CNCd HDPE chassis, which I believe was 15mm thick:



    I got one good hit on the side of Strix before my weapon died again, this time for a completely different small and annoying reason! This time the top two mounting screws had worked themselves loose and because of the resulting tilt the belt no longer engaged with the teeth on the motor pulley. Irritatingly the old wedge wasn't quite flat enough to outwedge Strix, and that coupled with a weird sudden drive glitch causing stutter and unintended movements (remember this, it's important later) meant that Strix thoroughly ran circles around me for the rest of the fight until time was called. I won on a judge's decision based on damage, I did think Strix edged it against me on aggression but the judges decision is final. The weird drive glitch went away once I plugged the link back in to test, so I chalked it up to just robots being robots and carried on.

    Fight 3



    Ye so this one was uh

    An experience



    Nigel Barrage had unfortunately snapped his weapon motor shaft in his last fight, and chose to pull a hard Brexit from the competition rather than face me weaponless. With that one hit, almost every threaded insert holding Orpheus' chassis together was torn clean out of the HDPE, and it seperated into about 5 distinct pieces. I also left a large bite mark in the wedge:



    Threaded inserts: not even once

    So at the end of the qualifiers I had 11 points out of a total 12, solidifying my place in the top 20.

    Fight 4

    My fight in the round of 20 was Hell's Angel, a magmotor powered axe that had already caused a Lipo fire at the event.



    As my top armour is thin carbon fiber, taking a hit from Hells Angel was very undesirable. So to make sure I didn't end up on his wedge I turned the weapon down to half speed at first to mess his wedge up before going in for the kill. The strategy worked and I ripped off his wedge. One of the hits also indirectly cracked one of his wheels from the sheer shock.

    Fight 5

    My round of 12 fight was against Aegis, a bot I'd faced last year in my tie breaker melee but never actually engaged.



    Once again this fight worried me since Rory's a really good driver who took out some nasty spinners earlier by outdriving them. I ran half speed in this fight as well, not wanting to get caught mid gyro turn. In this fight I had some control issues; the left hand belt had been looser than the right hand belt since the start of the competition but in this fight it began to slip across the pulley teeth hard when going in one direction, which made turning much slower than normal. Thankfully the wedge did its job and stopped Aegis getting any purchase on me, and I was able to line up an OOTA shot on him to win the fight.

    The following day I bodged a bolt under the left side belt to retension it, which sorted the drive issue.

    Fight 6

    In the quarter finals I was drawn against Calabash Brothers again.



    Confident I would be able to outdrive him again, I opted for the old wedge over the new one and planned to attack his wheels and backside. Unfortunately, this was where it ended for Shrapnel. That drive issue I had earlier against them and Strix had been caused by a tiny short on the ESC board across the calibrate jumper. When the ESC goes into calibrate mode, it takes the input from the sticks as min and max values, which affected my drive against Strix. However in this fight, by the end, calibrate mode had become stuck on and I lost complete control of the bot. Worse than simply losing to an electrical glitch, right before the ESC stops responding I clipped Calabash's wheel, cracking it and snapping his drive belt off:



    If the drive had lasted another 30 seconds without dying, I would have been able to line up another shot on his other side and taken his drive out completely! Frustrated to lose in that way but hey ho, these things happen!

    All in all Shrapnel performed amazingly this year and I'm so pleased with it! It needs very little refinement now, I have plans to use the extra weight to further reduce the bots gyro and need to buy a new Scorpion XL but aside from that, the new shaft retention system worked a treat and the Hardox 600 disc has stood up far better than the 500 disc did last year:



    (The white is actually an HDPE film from Aegis Mk II lol)

    I'm planning to do some Extreme Robots events later in the year and have another feather planned to be more live show friendly, and Shrapnel will hopefully attend the RoboDojo featherweight open in November. That's all for now, thanks for reading my rambles!

  2. #32

  3. #33

  4. #34
    Quote Originally Posted by MattLampitt View Post
    Love the write up.. what a strange way to lose drive!! What caused the short in the esc?
    Cheers! I couldn't tell you what was causing the short, the pins aren't touching and spraying it down with an air duster to remove any swarf doesn't seem to have helped. Just old maybe, it was a v1 that's been around for a good five+ years at this point.

    Quote Originally Posted by MattLampitt View Post
    You were definitely one of my favourites to watch this weekend and that hit on Orpheus was crazy.
    Ha thanks, a good few people had me down to win this year too! No pressure or anything…. The hit on Orpheus had me lost for words for a good minute or so, I'd never imagined Shrapnel could hit that hard!

    Quote Originally Posted by Eidg View Post
    Really impressive fights congratulations to your reliable robot.
    By looking your videos, it seems there are many good robots today.
    Thanks! The reliability has been a godsend, keeping it simple inside has definitely helped! And yeah the field was very impressive this year, definitely a meta change in the works with lots of different designs proving their effectiveness! Standouts for me were definitely Barróg and Aegis
    Last edited by Revsmin; 5th October 2022 at 15:26.

  5. #35

  6. #36
    Hi Matt, my drive pulleys are actually a custom designed HTD5 profile which I had 3D printed in sintered nylon by Shapeways

  7. #37

  8. #38
    Lighter, cheaper and it's easier to put a bolt pattern in a CAD and have it printed than try to get it accurately drilled by hand!

  9. #39

  10. #40
    I told myself I'd do more events in 2020 after I'd finished my postgrad


    lol


    STUFF 2: THE STUFFENING

    Not much to report on the bot itself. Shrapnel as you know it is retiring to go live on a̶ ̶f̶a̶r̶m̶ my shelf as a nice display piece. I could bring her back to events very easily after having a slight massive battery fire at its last event, since everything was still entirely intact bar the battery after the bolts holding the base on tore out their mounts and I got beached on my own arse (I'd always felt that base was too thin but couldn't be bothered to do anything about it, shows me I guess). There are more dignified ways to go out but the fire made it more epic so I shan't complain.

    Anyway I took the opportunity lockdown gave me to spend a lot of time working on a redux of the design, since there were a few areas I was unhappy with and I'd been wanting to change up the front end for a while anyway.

    I'm broke as hell rn but as soon as I can afford it, this disgusting piece of nightmare fuel will be at an event near you!







    It's less of a sequel and more of a redo, since in terms of design the main body is exactly the same, except now it's HDPE instead of Hardox, which saves a lot of weight and should be tougher.

    New disc should be more aggressive, same mass, diameter and speed as the original, just MOAR tooth because it was definitely necessary and not just because I can

    Internally she's gonna be basically the same, the only difference really is it'll now be two batteries instead of 1 since I can fit more capacity in that way

    The main differences are that the front end is totally redesigned, the floaty wedge was very successful as an idea but it wasn't an ideal shape for most opponents, hence the new bent HDPE armour setup which allows for a range of different wedgelets and forks.

    The original armour will return with some extra meat and more favorable angles for dealing with those pesky horizontals and undercutters, alongside a few others for drums and those new annoying big wheely bois that do me a concern

    I never got round to painting the original and it became the brown spinner, but I won't be pressed for time this time around so I intend to give her a proper fancy theme and paintjob

    Hopefully I can make some progress on this soon but don't hold your breath, I am literally skint :cri:

    See you all at an event soon hopefully xx
    Last edited by Revsmin; 7th August 2021 at 02:58.

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