Thread: Northern England & Scotland event startup

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?