Christmas- its time to hang up your stocking and disharge your Lipo's.
It's advised that Lipo and some other batteries are discharged if not in
use for a while. so with the winter holiday period approaching I chatted
to Adam about doing this.
I suggested we could run our batteries flat on one of our motors so we
tried this method-the battery easily run the unloaded motor for 8 minutes
and there was only a 0.3 drop in voltage after this so we connected the
turnigy charger and set it to discharge-this method was very slow but it
let us free to do other tasks.
We worked on the castor suspension first by cutting two angle brackets
to support the castor hinge at a higher level, I estimate 70% of the weight
of our Robot is at the front and the castors should make the front more
balanced and responsive to steering.
After welding the castors to thier base plates we looked to the scoop.
Originaly the return springs were set inside the scoop jaws but proved
unreliable and kept breaking so now the springs will be external and run along
the back -this will make them more vunerable to axes but it will be real bad luck
if we manged to lose all return capability.
Each modification comes with a consequence it seems, so the external springs
will lift the jaws off the Arena floor so we have made a beefy spike at the front
of the jaws as first inpact zone-to lift the enemy bot into the scoop-In Theory.
We are hoping to sand down the bodywork in our next session and give it
a lovely two tone paint job.
Here's some pitures
DSCN1977.jpgDSCN1982.jpgDSCN1985.jpgDSCN1986.jpgDSCN1993 (2).JPGDSCN1994.jpg