hows Carcinus coming along?
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hows Carcinus coming along?
Ummm........err............ummm..........Quote:
hows Carcinus coming along?
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...d/DSCN6061.jpg
:lol:
So yeah, as you can see it hasn't yet evolved into anything. Part of me relishes the challenge of trying to build it from scratch in one-and-a-half days, the other part of me is starting to think it's not worth the hassle and stress and that I'd be better leaving it until afterwards and take my time to build it right.
Drumroll's technically all ready to go but there are little things here and there that could be done to it in the remaining time that aren't essential but which would be good to have. Think I'm gonna sleep on it tonight and work out whether to push on with the Carcinus build or not.
On the topic of Drumroll, it's looking good if I do say so myself 8)
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...r2_build70.jpg
Although it has yet to have a proper test, I have given it a bit of a drive and a quick spin and I'm really happy. The drum needs some balancing work done to it (hello grinder) and the little things here and there that I mentioned could also be done, but the way it looks, moves and feels is much more like what I envisaged when I designed it.
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...r2_build71.jpg
More pics of the innards and assembly process: http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c367/ ... 5QQtppZZ16
EDIT: It weighs in at 11.6kg, so 2kg spare for....well, anything really. Most probably aluminium chassis upgrade.
That looks really good mate!
if theres anything you can do to Drumroll i would suggest you do it, i mean, its better to have one seriously pimping ( :rofl: ) robot than one good robot and a slightly half assed robot, thats not at all a jab at your building skills, but building a competitor in one-and-a-half days is going to be a stretch. i would love to see it though, so...umm...yeah :uhoh:
basically, just do whatever XD and looking great
Jack
build it! There's always the friday during the day to build as well as it's not fighting till the saturday.
You know you want to build it! We need to see more featherweight clawed robots :proud:
What kind of armour do you use for the chasis?
It's looking really good jamie hope carcinus will be ready for the UK champs.
I've decided to go for a halfway compromise and build Carcinus, but fix the claws so that they are static. Effectively that means that it'll be weaponless but the claws have always struggled to do anything of use so it's not like it's going to impair its performance.
It's the mechanism for actuating the claws that would be the biggest hassle to make properly in the time left but throwing everything else into a chassis shouldn't be much of a problem (touch wood) so that's now the plan for tomorrow :)
In answer to your question, the main chassis of Drumroll is made from RG1000 plastic which is a regenerated grade of Ultra-High Molecular Weight Polyethylene (UHMWPE). It's alright to use but having worked with Nylon again, I'd choose it over RG1000 in any future instances when I need an engineering plastic.
The armour in the above pictures is just 4mm thick Hardox (typical featherweight armour) lovingly painted in metallic blue 8)
where do you get the hardox from?
It was some of the stuff Gary had sitting around his workshop, but if you're looking to buy from a supplier, his came from JL Steel: http://www.jlsteel.co.uk
thanks jamie. Also how did you support the end of the shaft for the lifter on Kaizer?
also is there somewhere else nearer to East Anglia that does hardox?
Wow! Drumroll looks amazing! Great job Jamie. :D
jamie, how wide are those 125mm wheels?
I think the same width as the 100mm and 75mm wheels?
Short answer: no idea :roll:
25mm wide if i remember right
thanks!
Mine are 30mm wide, if that's any help.
Anyway:
Event Report
The UK Champs was a bit of a fail for Drumroll. Everything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong and I don't think it got through one fight without some problem or other. Most expensive failure was the Victor 885 catching fire during a whiteboard; turns out two of the corner FETs touched each other. I've yet to check it to see if it's repairable but if it's going to cost at least half the price or more of a new unit, I'm not going to bother.
So Drumroll was supposed to spend the Friday on display and looking pretty but once Grant came round asking if there were any robots for whiteboards I couldn't resist throwing it in for some fun. First fight was pretty pants, one of the wheels came loose and the drum didn't do much (I think the robot also spent most of it upside down), then fight after fight all manner of things happened, including armour bolts vibrating loose causing the hardox sides to fall off (my fault for not balancing the drum :roll: ), the rear wedge hinges being completely mangled by Boner (half-expected them to take punishment but not be goosed before competition day) and the aforementioned Victor issue (replaced with a SSR and Battleswitch thanks to Gary and Tom respectively)
The drum was also never really effective on the Friday; part of that may be due to the drum being quite light compared to the old one, but I think the main problem was my batteries. I never got round to conditioning them before the champs so they weren't really providing their full potential. It was a bit better on the Saturday as a result of some charges/discharges.
As for the Saturday fights:
Against NST; the remaining armour pieces got smashed and a weld or two broke, drum fell out and then the receiver battery broke and came out of the switch holder, thereby killing control to the robot.
Against Cyberon and Stagefright; I think I spent a lot of the fight inverted again, can't remember too much of what happened (need to rewatch the video) but then my Corona receiver gave up the ghost (second one to do so, I don't think they like shocks) so Drumroll was dead for the remainder of the fight.
Against Asgard and Heatwave; had a lack of drive on one side of the robot due to the grub screws in the drill gearbox not being tight enough (the drill/gearbox was a replacement for one that broke from an NST hit) so all I could do was spin in circles with the drum spinning, generating some minor gyroscopic forces, and hope for a lucky hit here and there. Somehow managed to get two points from that battle after one of my opponents drove into the pit but with a grand pathetic total of five points, it wasn't enough to see me through to the knock-out stages.
At that point I needed to fix the wheel if I was to continue with whiteboards or a possible shot at the Annihilator, but it was stuck on well and truly and proving a pain to remove, so at that point I was really fed-up and pi$$ed off with the robot so it was consigned to the car boot for the remainder of the event.
The strange thing was that I thought the robot was much improved going into this competition compared with the spec running at the 2010 Champs; back then it finished 12th and got to the Annihilator final, but this time it came joint 26th (tied with Cicatrix, ironic considering I built it :proud: ) so it was a horribly below-par performance in my opinion.
Upgrades
So how to improve it? Starting from the basics; the RG1000 chassis pieces are going to be replaced with 16mm Nylon to add some weight and improve structural properties. The plans for an aluminium chassis have been ditched as I feel Nylon is perfectly sufficient, I know how it will perform and I have surplus from Carcinus' material. The old Drumroll chassis was made in 2007 and only got 'decommissioned' so to speak late last year, so it definitely does the business. And although I'm planning on setting up a shed for a workshop, it would also still be easier to work with Nylon than aluminium with my current facilities so all things considered, it makes sense.
Next thing I'm thinking of is taking out the Nimhs (Carcinus can have them) and putting a lipo pack in there. I remember noticing how much of an improvement there was in old Drumroll/Boner at the champs last year when Gary put a lipo pack in it, and with the FlightPower discount just now it would be a good time to splash out on a pack or two.
Control-wise, everything was fine with the Scorpion XL so no repairs or improvements needed there. The Speed 900 is also fine so I'll be sticking with that for now, and sorting out my own SSR/battleswitch combo for controlling it.
Armour-wise, I'm going to weld on a back panel to connect the two side panels together so that the armour is all one piece, and then sort some custom-made hinges for the wedge at the back. That'll just consist of some pieces of steel welded to the wedge and back panel, then held together with a couple of big bolts.
All that should offer a big improvement over its most recent performance and then I'll see how it gets on and take any further modifications from there. No rush for it though, the next event is Robots Live Edinburgh so priority will fall to Carcinus and hopefully Grond :)
Should've just welded a big chunk of windmill on the front instead of the drum, that would've done it :lol: :lol: :lol:
They're turbines, not bloody windmills! :P
And yeah, should've just built a pusher too. Would've been much less hassle and I'd have probably got some decent fights :lame:
You will get a good discount from flightpower, but they just wont actually send you any lipos. There good like that.
Aye that's a good point. Even if I was to order them now, they probably wouldn't show up in time for the RL Edinburgh event. Might just pay a bit more and get some from that company you did (Century UK or something like that?)
Also remembered that I need to start on a beetleweight, so come payday I'll probably order some components for that. Until then, I've just found out that I've got Friday-Monday off so time to start planning my shed/workshop 8)
It's a Sunday afternoon, everyone's stuffed and lethargic after a big family meal, so what better way to pass the time than with some microscopic tinkering and toy mutilation:
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...m/DSCN6070.jpg
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...m/DSCN6069.jpg
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...m/DSCN6071.jpg
It's not finished yet but it was driving to a degree and was uber-nippy. It uses a couple of speed-hacked servos from GiantCod (the smallest ones they had) but I think I'll need to revert to my original plan of using a pair of Supertec Pico servos as these ones seem to be just a little too lightweight. I also need to find another battery as the one I'm using doesn't seem to get on with the receiver for some reason. It's a 4.8V pack that was used in a small RC aeroplane I used to have but despite the receiver working with my standard RX packs, it just blinks its LED really quickly when I plug in the plane pack. Silly thing.
Weapon servo arm still needs to be properly fitted and a back panel made but currently it weighs in the region of 60g. Was originally meant to be an ant but might as well try for the fleaweight category. It's not a serious contender though, just a bit of fun to mess around with on table tops :)
Cool. Thats pretty pimp
That is rather awesome :) will you be making it down to the AWS at all? It'd be fun to have a moving RW toy to play with instead of the static ones ;P
i second that :proud:
Haha, I nearly did this for my hypnodisc toy, I super glued 4g weights to each side of the disc and put a high speed motor on it that I over volted to hell, the thing cut through books with it's typical mangled plastic toy teeth still on. :twisted:
Sadly, the chassis is metal, making it heavy.
Awesome to see this, I wondered why people haven't done it even for a laugh up until now. I want to do it to the Panic Attack toy. :)
Good luck and videos please!
Yeah Joey I should be making it down to the Pontefract AWS, although I'm planning on having a proper decent ant to compete with by that time as well; this mini Chaos will be fun but it won't be able to stand up to much punishment.
I've got the Panic Attack toy sitting about as well that I'd like to modify. I'm never going to play with them as toys again and they're too beat up to be worth something to a collector so it makes sense to bring them to life. Panic Attack has got a good amount of room inside and I'd love to modify Shunt and Dead Metal too but Chaos 2 took my fancy the most so it's getting priority :)
I'll get a vid up once it's running. Chances are the weapon servo won't lift the flipper with enough force to self-right but oh well - self-righting hoops for the win :lol:
that servo wont flip an ant, maybe a flea but not an antweight
Surely that depends on the leverage and linkage mechanisms used? It has a stall torque of 1kg/cm on 4.8V and my arm is only going to be a straight beam around 3cm long, so that gives a lift capability of roughly 250g at stall, and slightly less under normal operating conditions.
It doesn't actually need to lift an ant if it stays within the fleaweight category but I'm sure I used one of these in an obese ant I made a good four or five years ago and it coped with lifting 150g alright. Guess I'll find out when I get it working :P
You're welcome to try on Catatonia when I get it rebuilt :) knowing my luck with weights it's probably going to weigh 42g and have a bit of a torque problem...
How easy did you find it to modify the toys btw? I've been looking at mine and it seems as though a lot of butchery is required to the innards.
Yeah, muchas butchering is required. I took a small dremel saw to the insides of Chaos 2 to remove all the intrusive bits of plastic that stopped me from fitting everything in. I still have all the internal components but if I was to put it back together, they'd all be flying around loose inside.
Basically, don't expect to be able to revert to the original pull-back spec of the toy once you have begun said butchering process :)
I tried that with my matilda pullback a little while ago, but it turns out it was a big toy that only just fit in the cube, but hardly had any space inside:(
i am going to try again now, hopefully this wont fail again:)
I'm tempted to try it with a stinger one I have laying arond :)
Small Update
Not really got anything exciting to post with regards to Carcinus progress or beetleweight development but I wasn't keen on a lack of updates so Drumroll it is!
After the UK champs, the chassis was in a bad state. Threads had stripped, nuts had pulled through their mounting holes and it was generally a mess. If I want to see an improvement in performance I might as well start strengthening and improving from the ground up, so a new chassis has been made out of 15mm Nylon 6 (or 16.5mm to be precise, more precise than Direct Plastics anyway). Opted for the blue stuff this time for a couple of reasons; it looked good on Boner, it saves me having to use a lot of spray cans painting my chassis blue, and it was actually the cheaper option. Also decided that I'm never making a chassis out of any other plastic besides Nylon in the future; nothing else in the 'bot' range (HDPE, RG1000, Polypro, UHMWPE) can compete with it. I've used the other ones in the past due to them costing less and me having little money but when that's less of an issue, it's clear Nylon is much more suited to the job:
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...r2_build76.jpg
It has mostly the same dimensions as the previous chassis but with slightly larger heads at the drum end of the machine and an altered curvy bit. Chassis height has increased a little as well, just to free up a little more space.
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...r2_build79.jpg
In comparison with the old chassis. Very similar but it looks so much more sturdy (which it is!) than the RG1000. It weighs a bit more too but I think the robot had 2kg spare at the champs so I'm currently not worried about weight.
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...r2_build84.jpg
Transferring all the component across. I've changed to Banebots wheels as the set I had on the robot at the champs were not particularly grippy and one of them got properly stuck on the drill shaft, so I had to butcher it to get it off. Although the green ones are more susceptible to wear and tear, they were the only ones in stock on Technobots at the time of ordering, but I plan on getting a set of orange and blue ones too so I can interchange depending on how good I feel the grip is. They're pretty low-cost and I've got the nut-insert melting method sussed so should be able to churn them out fairly easily.
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...r2_build89.jpg
Everything back in and wired up, which meant all was good for a quick test drive tonight where it seemed to perform well. Battleswitch for the weapon is goosed though (got a green LED on, but no clicking noise being made so it's not activating the SSR) so I'll need to get a new one of them before I can check the spin-up but barring a few cosmetic issues, the machine is back up to running spec. Hopefully nowhere near as many things will break, but RL Edinburgh will be a good opportunity to thrash it about and see.
Now with that out the way I can turn my attention to Carcinus. It's got all its parts in it, but needs the claw mechanism all sussed and fitted, then wiring, then testing etc. At least I know what I'll be doing this weekend...
drumroll is looking great now :)
keep us updated on Carcinus since my clawed bot will be taking shape this weekend as well and will be nice to see how they differ
btw, what are you using for your claws and are you re-enforcing them anywhere?
I think it looks awsome, especially with those green banebots wheels
looks great! :D
Just using the same claws as the old Carcinus (20mm x 40mm x 2mm steel box section) and no I won't be re-inforcing them anywhere. Even with the more powerful actuator in it, there won't be enough force to crush anything (except maybe some cardboard boxes) so it'll still be a wimpy little grabby bot :lame:Quote:
Originally Posted by mattsdragons
What power is your actuator? Is it only a 40kg, or a 100kg?
Technically on 24V, it produces 8000N (800kg) but considering I'll be running it on 19.2V and will have something like a 3:1 leverage ratio, there's no way I'll be getting 800kg out.
Also, the stroke arm of the actuator (the bit that moves in and out) is a piece of thin-walled aluminium tubing which I doubt would ever be able to be part of a system putting out that much force. Once it's built I'll see if I can take some sort of measurement (a cheap pair of scales to crush perhaps) to get an indication of its possible performance. It'll also be really, reeeeeaaaaalllly slow, so the chances of grabbing someone quickly enough to allow us to squeeze will be few and far between, especially with my dad's driving :lol: