Team Nuts' Build Diary

[Rapidrory]

Been a bit of a while since I've posted anything, but since the season's coming to a close I thought I'd bring this up to date.

The last few months have been very busy with live shows, but Nuts is still alive albeit with a few Thor induced bruises. Nuts somehow came 6th at the world championship, though I put that almost entirely down to luck and the heavily melee based format of the event. But still, not complaining; always amusing to be able to say that your robot is sixth in the "world" :L

The flails have been working well; although not hugely effective, they look and sound great when hitting things at full pelt, and occasionally manage to to put a dent in things (even managed to knock out Gravity's link in one round). Did have an unfortunate habit of falling off, but that was due to a nut and bolt coming undone which has now been replaced with a solid bar, so that shouldn't be a problem any more. Here's a video of it attacking a pallet ahead of the world champs:



The addition of a car horn has been one of my better decisions on that robot; that thing's hilarious :L

I do want to build a more serious heavyweight at some point, as fun though Nuts is it rarely actually influences a fight, more just runs away. My plan was to use the scooter motors as listed above, but unfortunately they seem to have been stopped being manufactured in July, and absolutely nowhere seems to stock them or the 1000W variants any more.. My plan would be to build something like shock-wave, ie 4wd with a centre mounted lifter (I'm annoyed I didn't spot it when it came up else it'd saved me a job). Probably won't start that project till the summer though as it's my final year of uni, and things are getting quite busy..

Richie is in a very sorry state ATM; ever since the FW champs I've more or less been running it without maintenance, and at Stevenage one of the drill gearboxes finally gave up the ghost after over a year of heavy service. The lifter had stopped working a long while before that, so there's very little that does still work on that bot. I've patched the drive up again now, but it really needs a full rebuild.

I'm planning a new feather, Richie 2. The plan for this would 4wd running off Dewalts, lifter running off another dewalt, and a Raex skirt to try and keep the spinners out (would be similar to the american bot uberclocker). Unfortunately, I got 18v XRP Dewalts, which while very powerful have the problem of having a separate gearbox that's a pain to mount. I've got the mill up and running so could make something up, but it's not an easy task.. My other alternative is to run a pair of NTM5060s for drive with a single stage spur gear setup... much lighter, more compact, and more crazy :L

Another feather project I have was instigated after a few beers, where I was persuaded to buy a featherweight spinner setup... As such I'm now in possession of almost all the parts to build a feather spinner. This may well be my champs bot next year, as I don't really have time to build Richie 2 due to uni work, and the spinner is a much simpler build. It'd be a vertical running off an NTM5050, and probably have the drill based drive units borrowed from Richie. Bit of Raex on there to keep the worst of the hits out and it should be good.

On to beetles.. Things have just got silly here; in another perhaps rash decision, I bought Lynx off Sam.. this was already the most I'd ever spent on a robot, and it wasn't even a working one. Since then I've put the new mill to good use and have turned Lynx into 'First Lefts' (bad pun on Last Rites) as seen below in this rather poor photo :



Lynx had a ~1Kw motor driving the spinner, which is crazy levels of overkill, but not wanting to spend any more on this robot (something I'm failing at as it's already up to about £150!) I had to just bolt it to the top as it's the only place it fits. I've connected it to the blade by a very heavy duty timing belt, so it should at least be able to make use of some of that power; It will spin up about as fast as I can move the throttle stick, and is unlikely to stop unless I tell it to or something breaks :L Below is a gentle test demonstrating it's scariness:



The drive runs a pair of brushless 40W Sk3s driven by Afro 12A... Afros are so much better than the 25A trackstars that were in there; it handles almost as if it were brushed. Big fan of the Afros and the SimonK firmware they run; makes brushless drive a whole lot easier