Team Jeopardy: Endeavour

[SamO]

Major Update Time!!!!!

A lot of stuff is happening here at the team jeopardy workshop. Ummm, where to start? Well, we picked up the gas for the welder a few weeks ago so we've had a go at that... with surprisingly good results:





Not to bad for some of my first few welds, picked up a massive sheet of mild steel from our local fabricators that were going to cut up and weld together just for the sake of practise. Also, those massive disgusting craters are where we tested the welder with out argon, so the metal all oxidised. Just did that to check the welder was working probably after about 25 years sat in a garage

Next we moved on to doing some more TZ85 programing. Some of you may have seen that we did Craig's ESC and whilst we were at we did two for ourselves as well. We bought one of those flash tools off of Hobby King as we thought it would make the whole process a bit quicker. To our surprise when we got it out the packet, we discovered that there was a 10 pin idc connector on the end of it as opposed to the 6 pin on our programmer. This led to us doing a lot more work on this than expected as we had to cut of the connector on the flash tool, test to see which six wires were actually being used and then do some crazy soldering to link it all to a six pin connector. The result was this:



Next, doing a little upgrade on Endeavour by putting a gyro in it. This should make it more controllable than it is at the moment as well giving the potential for dad to drive it

Finally, the new feather! Parts have started arriving for it. Got the weapons system, the motors-gearboxes, wheels, ESC's and ordered some metal off John the other day. A quick pic of the bane bots order:



Four 775 motors, two 16-1 gearboxes, four wheels and some other bits and bobs. Ended up having to pay £40 duty tax which I was wasn't too happy about but as soon as I opened the box all was forgotten :P

Going to start knocking up the wooden model tomorrow, and then I've got to spend some more money :'( Oh well, after all it is designed to be spent LOL!!! Oooo, and for any one remotely, at all interested, the new machine is going be called "Intrepid" and should be ready for the champs next year (maybe.....).

Cheers for reading

Edit: Bit of a photo spam... soz!

[harry hills]

10/10 would read again lol. More photo spam next update please

[SamO]

LOL glad you enjoyed reading it haz ! I shall try my hardest with the pictures next time

[daveimi]

What type of robot is the new one going to be? A pusher?

[Revsmin]

Finally, the new feather! Parts have started arriving for it. Got the weapons system

Read the post.

[SamO]

yer, going to have a weapon

[Andy]

Looks great Sam and whatever weapon it has, its bound to be decent with that good reliable drive

[SamO]

Update Time!!!!!

We went to Bluewater a few weeks ago with Endeavour... it didn't end well!!!!! Managed to survive an impressive 2 fights before one of the motors burnt out, killing the robot and ending our fun for the weekend Didn't bother going on the Sunday as we had no replacements. Took the motor apart and discovered the fan had melted (again) and then snapped off one of the brushes. The picture below should show it better:


So after this, Endeavour has had some serious TLC. The 14.4v 550's have been swapped out for some 18v 755's!:


To make this fit we had to file out some holes in the bulkhead and then set up some extra mounting to support the larger motor, nothing too major. The new motor pod looked like this (the one on the right):


Then when they were both fitted in the robot, it looked like this. You can see the new filter we are experimenting with to try and keep the motor cool. Its just the dust filter off a vacuum cleaner. Wouldn't be surprised if it began to melt but worth a shot I guess:


Lastly, the gyro. It has finally been successfully installed after quite a bit of hassle. Thanks to Dave Weston for selling it to us :


So that's Endeavour ready for Gloucester next weekend. Ohhh, and the build on the new bot will get underway soon, just waiting on the metal from Jon to get started.

Cheers

[shakesc]

Nice drill motors, what drills are you stripping down for those?

[SamO]

Makita's