So... normally at the end of the year, I'd do a round up of the performance of the bots and the team in general. There really isn't much to say on the performance front. I attended the grand old sum of one event - Ant Freeze 6 - which I've already written about in a previous post so I'll cover what the statues of the robots are, what the plans for them are going forward and what is happening with BotFest.

Antweights - Amai, Ikari, Lafiel, Osu and Ramu
As I've mentioned before, Osu in its current form is now officially retired. I am sure I'll get around to rebuilding this one fairly soon, I've got some of the parts needed to do this. Ramu needs a new ESC which I've got one sitting around but it isn't the neat NanoTwo. It'll need a OrangeRX receiver to go with it.

Ikari remains pretty much as is though it now has a slightly thicker back plate with miniature wings on it so it won't end up on its side. Amai has some smaller wheels on it now and a PTFE wedge plate on the front for getting underneath opponents. It is still pretty scrappy but its held up fairly well given its really dodgy gluing :P Lafiel went under a rebuild but I found it was marginally too wide. I'll get around to rebuilding it again when time permits, all the electronics for that still work nicely.

Beetleweights - The Honey Badger and Shu!
The Honey Badger 4.0 has been looked at but hasn't had any repair work done since the 2019 BW championship. It needs at least new side panels out of black HDPE and a new wedge plate. Functionally, it seems to be fine. Shu! 2.0 was pretty much dismantled and will be rebuilt as Shu! 3.0 in a planned speed build challenge I am dreaming up.

Featherweights - Azriel
Poor old Azriel 1.0 hasn't seen any action at all this year despite a new axe mechanism being fitted and a tidy up of the wiring. I had hoped to go to RoboDojo with it in July but circumstances here changed to prevent that. My current line of thinking with that is to build a completely new Azriel 2.0 to take advantage of a new Scythe-Axe that I've now got (many thanks Jamie) coupled to a brand new gearing mechanism. The 1.0 version will then become a test bed for my brushless programmer tool which I talked about earlier on in the year.

Before that happens though, I am hoping to stage a fight with it facing the original Honey Badger 1.0. I found a ESC and some batteries, threw those on the original test chassis (from 2016/17!) and it runs, albeit without a weapon at the moment since the mount is still badly twisted. However, I argue it runs better than it did back in Grantham!

Middleweights - Jibril and Kaizen
Jibril 2.0 has been the most talked about thing in this build diary this year and it is coming along reasonably nicely. It needs a lot of the armour cutting and bolting onto it along with the new Scythe-Axe which I am currently in talks with someone to get cut for me. There is still a bunch of work to do on the carrier for the weapon to make it more secure than the 1.x versions in terms of securing gears to the shafts and so on but its coming along. I did a build video of the construction of the carrier as well :P



Kaizen I am planning to bring back next year with a ever growing parts collection here for it. Once Jibril 2.0 is done, I'll see about getting started with that.

BotFest
Oh boy... so as you may know, BotFest 4 was cancelled twice and, if being honest, the second time it was cancelled, that costed me financially. Of course, with the way things are at the moment, I can't say when it'll be back. I am *hoping* for a return anywhere from March onwards but I just can't say when that will be at the moment. Things aren't entirely standing still though, more to come on that later in 2021...

Miscellaneous
I've been dabbling with creating my own brushless ESC programmer as I think I alluded to earlier on in the year. Still working out some kinks in it but the general idea is to have something automatically create a suitable .hex file from the SimonK assembly files and then be able to flash that onto the ESC. I've had mixed results from it so far but when I've sorted the kinks out, I'll see about releasing it for everyone to try (provided you have a USBAsp programming tool).