Questions/builds thread.

[PJ-27]

Looking neat, are you coming to the UK Champs?

[Ellis]

I am, yes.

[Bodge Job]

Looking good! Hope it goes well at the champs!

[Ellis]

It lifts, it lifts, it lifts!

Sort of!

Kinda!

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Well, it does what we wanted it to! Up and down and bloody fast too. Our setup works!

The motor has been mounted with a reinforced PVC T-joint (lol) and a strip of thin steel to hold it in place (hard to explain, pics will make more sense). Sounds weak, but I promise it's strong. Not sure how it will react to hard shocks; we mounted the motor in rubber to absorb any major blows.

The lifter arms are finished, save armour. The welds are.. interesting, but quite strong, plus they're braced. The legs are also complete. The geometry is quite good, if I may say so myself! It lifts really quite high for a 4-bar.

It took some thinking to get the threaded rod linkage business setup. We realised that our initial plan wouldn't work (desperately wouldn't), so we redesigned that and it works a treat. Wow, sounds so simple when you say it like that. Took us two evenings!

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As I said, the speed of the lift is fantastic. Comes up in a second or two. Very satisfying. However, we fear our lift ratio is too extreme. I think it's roughly 5:1 which on paper should work absolutely fine. Though, when I leaned on the tip of the lifter it struggled with just a few kilos on it. In fairness to the robot; its batteries were too dead to drive around, so maybe with a fresh charge it'll lift just fine. I really hope it will be powerful enough, as the current motion is just lovely! Once we get it speed controlled and radio controlled, we'll get a video up. Might be quite some time if we need to change the ratio.

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I feel like I'm babbling so I'll stop here. It's hard to put the amount of thought and work that each piece of the puzzle requires into text, so I'll stop here and save myself (and you guys) the hassle! Take a look at the pics, they're the most recent 9.

http://s1088.photobucket.com/albums/i32 ... elentless/

[james...venom]

That looks like. Really nice macgine. Looking forward to seeing it running. Very nice shape!

[PJ-27]

Impressive, get a video up so we can see the mech in action.

[Ellis]

Thanks both. We tested the lifter with freshly charged batteries, it lifted a 10kg dumbbell with relative ease. Considering the way we designed it the enemy robot can't sit entirely over the lifter, it should be fine. I reckon even if it had to lift 13.6kg it could do it.

Aside from some small motor mount issues, success! I'll get a video up once it's tidied up a bit and with proportional radio control.

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Having found out who we're fighting in our first battle we have tactically decided to leave roboteering indefinitely.

Bye!

[Ellis]

Limit switch business is now all done! Many thanks for the diagram, Dave, it works an absolute treat. I was dreading mounting the microswitches; part of me told me it was going to be a real fiddle. Thankfully, it went quite smoothly. Worked first time, perfect cut off timing!

After connecting the new ESC for the lifter and the rx, we've lost the use of our toggles (they allowed us to isolate drive and the weapon, for safety and convenience when testing). We can't tell at all why, if we unplug the channel again the toggles work as they always have. It's bizarre. So, instead of trying to fix it, we've decided to lose them. More things to go wrong in battle, so it's actually probably a good thing.

So, getting rid of those toggles aside, we've got to wire in a powerlight, tidy up the cables a little, and the wiring should be complete!

It weighs almost 11kg at the moment, it doesn't feel any less nippy for it, though. We spent a few minutes bashing about the living room. It lifted the sofas! Pushed them about a fair bit too. We may not be pretty, but we won't go down without a fight! NST, Inertia, you best be prepared! We might lift you to death! :twisted:

Will get a video up soon.

Next big job is the armour, and then it should be ready for the champs.

[PJ-27]

You'd be surprised how effective a lifter can be if well driven. Just look at the likes of Biohazard and Panic Attack.

Inertia XL and NST in one fight?! Bring plenty of spares!

[Anttazz]

Strangely, it might actually be good for you that you have Inertia in with another spinner rather than with a flipper/ram bot because he'll probably use his anti spinner creation rather than the disc.

It was something like this last year when Buzzbar was in town: