Thread: Team Death - New Heavyweight

You know what day it is, because I do!

So today, another interesting day.
We started by charging the old battery, which had been tested to ensure it wasn't damaged from last weeks test, and the new battery, to an equal amount that should give us plenty of test time later on.
Whilst these charged, we set off on rectifying a few issues we noted last week;
We started out by applying some additional castors further up the underneath of the shovel, in the hopes that it'd give a little extra weight to the rear to fix some of the driving issues, notable lack of grip and lots of wheel spin.
I spent a while going through the manual for the transmitter - trying to find a way to correct some control issues we had last week, and improve upon the new 'tank' style driving. However, to no avail. We had a bit of better luck fiddling with the cables, and plugging the wires into different ports on the receiver. However, in the end we settled for going back to using what we had before. This is due to us finding evidence of one of the bolts used to hold some polycarbonate armor in place had been scraping on the floor of the last test - it was scuffed up and worn. We later figured out this may have contributed to some control issues last test, as the bot did not entirely lay flat on the floor - one wheel was always slightly above an ideal level for drive and was easily spinnable alone due to an extremely poor grip on the floor. So the excess thread on the bolt was cut, and the bot laid back on the floor - and this time both wheels made sufficient contact with the floor that neither could be spun alone without the entire bot moving.
With that, we were once again on our way to the designated test area.

However, this test lasted not long at all - due to an unfortunate collision with a pile of... varying items of waste.
After the bot was pulled out, we couldn't get it working again - our initial thought was that the wheel was spinning on its entral pole - due to it not being worn down to a flat enough surface for the wheel to grip on after coming slightly lose. We didn't have the correct tools to fix this out in the field, so we put it back on the truck and got back to the shop. Here it became quite quickly obvious the failure was something a little more sinister. In fact the weld joint on the sprocket to the pole had entirely sheered off - not sure if it was a poor weld joint, or if there was much more force than intended occuring here. However the sprocket is off an ancient Austin A40 car, and spent nearly all its life covered in grease and oil, so this may have caused the welding to not take as well as could be hoped. Either way, Colin is going to aim to correct it in time for next Sunday. When hopefully we'll be able to test it without any issues cropping up!

An image, showing the weld joint and its fairly easy to see cracking around the joint
weld.jpg