RogueTwo Robots

I'll get Spinza finished, that bends.....

Don't breath this.

Nowhere near as fancy as the Shocking Toons 12 Roboteering Days of Christmas, but it's all you're getting :proud:

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3..._card_2011.jpg

Nice one mate,merry Christmas


Jack Daniels

Spent some time on Christmas eve writing a little review of how this year has been in terms of robots, and how things will hopefully progress next year. I'll warn you that it's a pretty long post and you'll probably only want to read it if you're extremely bored or extremely interested :proud:


RogueTwo Robots 2011 Review

Well another year has come and gone and, looking back, it€™s been a somewhat subdued year. Things started off well in January with me being fortunate enough to find paid employment. After cost-cutting compromises in builds throughout 2010, it was going to be nice to inject some much-needed investment into the robots. The new design for Carcinus was drawn up, and the main plan for Drumroll II was to move to an aluminium chassis once the UK champs had taken place.

When it came to the UK champs, things didn€™t go so well. Due to poor time management and motivation issues, Carcinus was not completed in time and was withdrawn from the competition. Drumroll II, despite being much-improved in my eyes compared to the 2010 version, also had a shocker of an event and suffered some sort of failure in every fight. It became clear that it would need to be rebuilt properly from scratch to eliminate some flaws and make it a more battle-capable machine.

Having observed the rebuilt Boner and worked with Nylon again with Carcinus, I opted to ditch plans for an aluminium chassis on Drumroll II and get some more Nylon. The rebuild went quickly and though it€™s never been fully finished (Hardox armour outstanding) the robot was ready to run again two months later at Robots Live in Edinburgh. No major catastrophes occurred there and the chassis is still sound so it€™s a solid foundation on which to build. Carcinus also made it to the running stage for Edinburgh, minus working claws. These have been a bugbear throughout the year and I€™ve lacked the motivation to complete the mechanism, but the rest of the robot seemed to be an improvement on the old version.

The next event on the calendar was an anweight event so the featherweights got relegated to under the bed while my attention turned to smaller endeavours. I had always had an urge to try out antweights and although I did manage to make two creations, they were sub-standard and failed to inspire me. Witnessing several other antweight battles at the event, I realised that this class was not for me. I have great respect for some of the feats of engineering that are produced in antweights, but I€™ve since decided that I won€™t be pursuing them any further.

So that would turn out to be the last event of the year for the team. The latter half of the year has been uncharacteristically quiet, but it did allow me to turn my attentions to setting up a workshop and kitting it out for use; a long over-due and much needed upgrade! Already it€™s resulted in part-finished beetleweight creations and various other little things, but Carcinus and Drumroll still sit in pieces (and have been for months) as their winter servicing takes its time.

So where do things stand now? Well as has been mentioned, Drumroll is changing to a brushless weapon setup. The drum is currently at ALK Engineering, having some endcaps made up as the existing ones were held in by bolts which would likely fail with the forces being exerted, so the new ones will be welded in. The brushless motor has had a bigger shaft made and is awaiting a mounting plate and associated speed controller. The lithium battery pack still needs to be fitted but its location can€™t be properly decided until the ESC is bought and positioned. Once all of those are in place, the internals will be serviced and re-assembled and then it will finally be time to redo the armour and get the robot spruced up ready for combat.

With regards to Carcinus, it is currently having a slight drive re-arrangement (keeping hush on it but it should be cool, going back to the original plan of having it move like a crab). This severely alters the internal space and thus the component arrangement, and I€™ve still to determine where everything will go. The claws will probably not be powered by an actuator any more. Instead they will be geared, most likely in such a way that they close pretty fast, but won€™t have huge amounts of grip. This is the one area that I am still extremely undecided on, so I have no idea what the final result will be, but we shall soon see.

Looking ahead to 2012, the tentative plans are thus:
The priority is to get Carcinus and Drumroll back up to full running spec as quickly as possible, and then test, test and test again to try and improve reliability. I€™ve got one half-built beetleweight needing attention but I€™ll save that as a side project that I can do little bits on here and there on the odd weekday night. There are two featherweight robot designs in the pipeline, and neither are going to be straight-forward to build. One is the electric axe, using a Bosch 400 motor as the weapon drive source; the other is the pneumatic flipper RW replica, that€™ll need an MDF mock-up or two to get the shapes right. Ideally I€™d like to have one of these ready for June, in the quite-likely event that Robots Live will be back in Edinburgh; that would allow both me and my dad to drive robots with active weapons. But it will take a lot of effort and skill to get either one ready, so I€™ll have to hope for lots of motivation and determination :)
And finally, I€™m going to try and record a €˜Build a Featherweight Robot€™ series of videos to provide a source of information for newcomers. The robot in question will be four-wheel-drive and feature a spinning drum (no surprises there!) but I hope to document the construction of my axe and flipper weapons as well to add as appendices should any newcomers want to know how to build different weapons.

That€™s a lot of rambling for one post, and a lot of plans for the new year. The target now is to look back next December and see how many of those aims I€™ve actually managed to achieve :)

Tldr

Has anyone got bridge notes for this novel? :proud:

2011 was $h!t, 2012 will (hopefully) be better :)
I don't talk that much in person, but as soon as my fingers meet a keyboard I can ramble for Scotland!

be interesting to see your newest version of carcinus - forgive the spelling if thats wrong lol i was days away from getting pinsors old chassis weighed in with a load of other junk but then at the last minute had a change of heart so i've just stuck with it again now.

like you i've got a few different things i wana get building and now with the added new job money isnt a problem, but for me once again im at the stage of hardly having the time again lol

think for me over christmas im getting pinsor finished off and sorting out my drum spinner (Y), but it's gonna be having a beater now- it'll still look like a drum when it spins thou ;D

Beaters are cool 8)
I did think about one for Drumroll way way back, and still wouldn't mind getting one made, but it's now miles down my list of priorities, especially since I need to get the bot running properly before considering anything so fancy. But keep us updated with your progress :)

will indeed :) yeah hoping a 3.5kg beaters the way forward :twisted:

might try doing some work on it friday so ill do any necessary updates