So, we just had our first event, Extreme Robots in Colchester. Firstly, thank you to those who we spoke to over the weekend, who helped fix some of our issues and gave us advice for the future.

This is Bolts v1, the version that we took with us to Colchester:
Bolts v1.jpg
A simple wood and plastic wedge with big wheels. Needless to say we experienced the teething problems expected from a new team and their first bot. So here's a summary of the event for us.

Saturday:
Fight 1 - Signal Issues stopped us from entering, we'd never encountered it before and it worked fine the second we got back on the bench, so we looked puzzled and ignored it for now.
Fight 2 - I drove Bolts rather badly, being impatient throwing it into full speed and slamming into a couple of walls. Both gearboxes lost their bearings after the spring holding them in came loose. Also, someone, we think Oddbot, punched a nice hole in one of our wheels.
Fight 3 - Despite our efforts we were still having gearbox trouble, working fine on the bench it couldn't move under its own weight, the gearboxes just clicking as if over torqued. It wasn't until after the show that evening we realised how to fix this.
Fight 4 - After replacing motors/gearboxes to a set of spares we got back into the arena. Peter drove this fight, proving he was much better at it than I am. Sadly during repairs we have to break the heat press on our wheel nut to replace the wheel with a hole in it. This led to a wheel rolling away during the fight, which we expected. We didn't expect the other to come rolling off shortly after.

Overnight we took a look inside bolts and found that, somehow, we managed to shred one of the motor mounts we bought from Alex, leaving our gearbox spinning freely, and we didn't have spares.
We also had a revelation when we realised our gearbox trouble came from the fact that the ring holding the spring down was the torque ring in the drill we took them from.

Sunday:
Fight 1 - Peter drove again, with new motors and tightened gearboxes we ran well in the arena. Until we came face to face with Explosion. As we were flipped over a wire came out of a connector block, killing one motor. Trying to drive with only one side meant the hot glue, kindly donated by Chris, that was holding our broken mount failed and the gearbox began spinning again. Finally, after losing our drive Explosion came back one more time to throw us over the wall and out of the arena, a personal highlight of mine.
Fight 2 - After reconnecting the wire and re-gluing the mount we were feeling confident we'd be able to enter two in a row for the first time. Of course, confidence is a killer, and our signal issues returned to stop us making it to the arena.
Fight 3 - Another failed start for us, the glue holding the mount once again failed, this time on the entrance to the arena.
At this point we decided that we couldn't repair on site and we called it a weekend. We had a two hour drive ahead of us and packed up early, said goodbye to those around us and left early.

We learned a lot for our first event, and saw a glimpse of how much more we haven't got a clue about. We already have ideas about how to improve for Bolts v1.1 so expect a post about that soon. Thanks again to the people who gave us a hand and took the time to have a chat. We'll be back.