Oh boy, it's been a while.

I took it to Burgess Hill, and managed to murder 4 OrangeRXs in <24 hours. After the 4th one (donated by some lovely beetle weight guys, THANKS!) I figured that the universe was telling me to give it up. The casualties:
 (antenna mod on the right is my own work)

I've got the robot moving again under remote control, this time with a LemonRX receiver. I'm not 100% sure why the OrangeRXs kept dying. I was blaming the large arcing and sparking that happens every time I insert the removable link/fuse but I couldn't get voltage spikes of >7.2 Volts during testing which is just within the maximum voltage of an OrangeRX so they should have been okay. The LemonRX on the other hand has a maximum voltage of ~10 Volts so should be more immune to that kind of crud. Of course I wouldn't be an engineer if I didn't then go and design an over complicated way of fixing the problem, thus I present my eFuse:


It's approximately 50mm x 31mm x 7mm has under voltage, over voltage and over current lock out, with automatic re-try. It can be set to custom voltage/current limits. It will also soft start to stop arcing/sparking and prolong contact lifetimes. Still a bit more work to do but I'm hoping it'll be amazing.

Of course now I've fixed the receiver I find out that the mixer (GWS V-TAIL MIXER) is acting up, when connected to an oscilloscope it seems to do the right thing but when in the robot it starts acting funny. I need to do some further testing and may have to buy a new one. Although I could make one...

To distract myself from the non-working robot I've designed some snazzy lights to go inside the drive belt area. They are programmable and can run through some nice patterns, here they are during development:


And with the large 18V Dewalt motors I had a few months ago I started drawing up robot designs while at Newcastle Maker Faire and when I got back I laser cut one out of cardboard to see how it would fit together. Its inspired by Tormenta 3 as well as some interesting conversations I had with makers at Maker Faire.


The cardboard will be replaced with water-jetted Hardox ~3mm thick. Gives a new meaning to Cardboard Aided Design.