Roboriots 2022:

This update is certainly very late, and it's a little frustrating to come back to this diary and see all of the accents corrupted, but better late than never! Roboriots 2022 was the welcome return of robot fighting in Ireland for the first time in nearly three years, and was also the first true opportunity to give both FW Barrógs a spin in a long time. Due to much more of my focus during lockdown being on my cluster robot as well as working on my BW Babróg, very little time was actually spent on the Barrógs due to how well each of them actually worked already, though a few changes did make their way into the final products.


Team Barróg ready for action!

For starters, both robots received a drive upgrade. After each bot lost a side of drive due to a blown fuse, the decision was made to upgrade from 30A ESC’s powering either side of drive to 80A ESC’s, effectively (at least I hope) making them bulletproof. Outside of that, Barróg Doom’s only major upgrade was a swapping around of the forks, from two 20mm wide forks to three 15mm wide ones. I’ve been looking into ways of moving the weight around in the robot for a while now, and this was a way of using some of the new extra weight to hopefully stand a better chance of getting under robots head on.

The original Barróg meanwhile had a very new and fancy upgrade in the works. The replacement cheap Chinese linac we got for it after the original Gimson linac was destroyed for the millionth time had proven surprisingly decent, offering enough lift with an actual upgrade in top speed. However, since I was already planning some experiments with more powerful linacs with my new FW cluster robot, I decided to do the same with Barróg. I ended up getting a new custom 100mm GLA750 actuator, with the normal motor replaced with an 18V S550 motor, greatly improving the speed and power offered for lifting.


Not the new linac, but the one I used in between the FW 2019 champs and Roboriots 2022. A very good budget option!

These motors promised a lot of speed and power, but the main reason you don’t see these conversions is due to the higher current draw of the motor, which would normally be too much for the limit switched within the actuator to handle. For my cluster, I resolved this by adding far chunkier diodes and limit switches to physical locations on the final assembly, which would cut the power in one direction when pressed. This would not be an option on Barróg however with its far more open plan, and so an electronic solution would be needed. Stay with me, because this might be the most complicated thing I’ve ever needed to explain, and even I struggle to understand it sometimes.

My idea was essentially this: the motor on the linac would be fed as normal by a standard 30A ESC. Instead of the limit switches being powered by the same current feeding the motor, they would be fed by a separate 5V 5A system through the use of a 12A ESC. When a limit switch was hit within the actuator, this would be fed through a separate relay, cutting the power to the main motor. The major challenge with this system was that, to function like a normal limit switch/diode setup, you needed the direction of both ESC’s in the system to be synchronised, otherwise either nothing would move, or the switches wouldn’t work to stop the linac. This is where some clever mixing on the Tx comes into play: I managed to program it so that when I moved left or right on the weapon stick, the smaller ESC would instantly go either 100 or -100 depending on the direction, no matter how small the input, while the larger ESC would operate normally. This syncs both systems up, and with the relay acting as the in-between system, I now had the means to apply the greatest direct upgrade to Barróg it had seen since the introduction of the RG1000 material.


The new linac system, laid out in as simple a way as I can manage. The final product was far more compact.

The format of fights was basically unchanged from Roboriots 2019, with four FW rumbles spread across the two days. Different this time however was that there would be an actual trophy to fight over, lovingly handmade by Dr. Zulu himself once more. Like last time, I’ll just link the fights, and give some general overview comments witnessed across the event. Thanks again to Team Ironclads for all of the event footage!

Fight 1:

Fight 2:


Fight 3:

Fight 4:




  • Due to the timing of the event, my dad actually wasn’t present on the Saturday, so I would only be able to fight with one robot at a time. Given that I had mainly been driving Doom since 2019, and that most of the upgrades were focused on Barróg 1, I drove that for the entire Saturday. I actually enjoyed it so much that I kept on driving it during the Sunday, while my dad took to driving Doom for the first time.



Barróg and Regicide ready to go into the arena.


  • I’ve definitely improved my radio mixing since the last time I had driven Barróg, because the handling of the robot was just perfect. It was very easy to keep Barróg pointing in one direction and to follow an opponent. The drive has remained super strong, and after a while I felt much more comfortable tossing it around; the new ESC’s did the job perfectly, and the wheels remain surprisingly durable.
  • The new linac surpassed my expectations. It was incredibly speedy, powerful, and durable. Despite all the electronic complexity that went into it, I never had to give it much thought, it just worked in a way I was pretty unfamiliar with. The hinged forks also made getting under bots a breeze, the only issues they gave me were in how they got caught on the MDF floor, which wouldn’t be a problem on a proper steel one.



Barróg in the arena ready to fight!


  • While I’ve mostly spent the last few years chasing the snake-mech suplex grabbers with Doom and my beetleweight Babróg, driving the original bot again made me really appreciate the value of that old style of lifter all over again. The linac and “reverse grabbing arms” meant that once I got hold of someone, they were basically at my mercy. Further, because so much of Barróg’s weight is at the back by default, having an opponent up front actually tends to even out the weight distribution on the bot, allowing me to drive comfortably around. It was so effective, that after fights I was able to drive around and bring all of the immobile robots back over to the arena entrance. In an arena with a pit, Barróg remains very dangerous.
  • This was my dad’s first time driving Barróg Doom, and given how many years it had been since he last drove the machine, I’d say he did pretty well. The new tri-fork setup looked very good at getting under bots, though of course the MDF arena certainly made things a little trickier. The weapon on Doom is much trickier to manage than on the original, with how far an opponent needs to be up it, as well as the increased risk of blowing itself up, so I can understand why the fabled suplex was harder to find this time round. When I eventually make a third Barróg, that will probably be one of the first things to fix.



The FW Díotóir that was at the event. Was nice to both work on getting it ready for the last fight, as well as fighting against it in general!


  • This was one of the few events I will likely ever go to where absolutely nothing ever broke at all. Most of my time outside of fights was spent speaking to spectators as they walked past, as well as helping to fix other robots (including fitting a new safety link system to the FW Díotóir.



The winners trophy for the event. Dr. Zulu always goes crazy with these trophies.

In the end, this event went as well as I could ever expect. All of our robots worked basically perfectly, put on a decent show, and after winning all four of the melee’s, Barróg finally had its first event win! It definitely wasn’t like the fields you would see at a major FW tournament, but it felt good nonetheless, and the trophy really was spectacular! With Díotóir winning the heavyweight category as well, it was nice that for the first time, both categories in the main Irish event were won by Irish robots. Thank you so much to all the kind and hardworking folks at Mechatrons and the staff at the National Basketball Arena, and to all the other roboteers. I look forward to the event taking place later this year, and hope that the Barróg’s can return to a large-scale tournament in Europe someday soon!




Barróg and Díotóir, the winners of their respective categories!