Thread: Ensign Wedgeley Crusher (FW Sportsman)

Originally Posted by Ocracoke

It is heartening to see a few newcomers come into this sport, go out to achieve something and then coming out with something that actually looks like the design they envisaged, so well done. It can be quite a learning curve to get to grips with what works and what doesn't. I guess it being in the Sportsman event would have come back (hopefully) in one piece?

Thanks!

Yep, we didn't have too much damage; just enough dents and scratches to feel like we'd "been there", and a slightly busted up motor after one fight.

Originally Posted by RogueTwoRobots

Well that was a really enjoyable read. I'm not on here often much anymore but glad I had a look-in today.

Great job on getting your first bot together so quickly and as Ocracoke said, looking very close to your original design. The funny thing about wonky holes and such is that you know exactly where they are, but to most observers, they couldn't spot them. Looking at your final pic before leaving for the event, everything looked like it was where it was supposed to be. Almost every robot has a wonky something (with exception of the Nippers and the Dutch guys probably ) so don't worry too much about it!

Looking forward to seeing how it evolves

Cheers, glad you liked it! And thanks for the inspiration, I think there's more than a little hint of Coyote in EWC.

I think the only really wonky bit was the front of the wedge, because the front plate is misaligned from the base by about 10 mm (curiously that's also the thickness of the HDPE, it's almost like *someone* measured it wrong then didn't have time to fix it). Other than that you're probably right, it's only noticeable to use because we've spent so long looking up close...


Next, quick lowdown on the Robodojo event...

We arrived just after 830, still stressed from the day before and mostly excited about the prospect of an egg butty from the van outside (they offered the addition of a hash brown to the egg butty for a small fee, which was a cause of great excitement).

Still, we were technically there for ROBOTIN', not eating fried food, so we staked out a quarter of a table and set out the Ensign for tech checking. This went fine in the event; turns out the AR610 does shut down the drive on loss of signal, or maybe the FeatherTwo does or something, but in any event the wheels stopped turning when the Tx went off so GOOD TIMES. We just needed a locking bar for the weapon, which was swiftly bodged from a piece of scrap HDPE (we took all the offcuts with us, I'm gonna claim for things like that, it was really because I couldn't be arsed to unload the car the night before). After that, we put the spare battery (bought from HK 3 days earlier) to charge, and obtained an egg butty with a hash brown in it which lived up to ALL my expectations. It was then a matter of waiting for the first fight, and chatting to our fellow competitors (who were all excellent folks). We drew straws to see who would drive; Simon lost, so he had to do it.
EDIT: in the finest Scrapheap Challenge tradition, we also spent this time decorating the robot (using sharpies).

FIGHT 1: Tantrum
Tantrum was a really quite intimidating thwackbot, with a nasty chunk of broken saw blade as a weapon. If one were to stretch to the assumption that Wedgeley's weapon and drive would function exactly as intended, there wasn't much for us to grab onto and Tantrum's tyres were huge and grippy, so grabbing was unlikely to give us much control.
Anyway, here's the fight:

Fair play to Simon here, no one had ever driven this machine before and his credentials for the job consisted of "had driven his nephew's RC car at Christmas". Managing to exact some semblance of control was quite an achievement, but the conclusion was probably inevitable given how twitchy the robot was to steer.
Nevertheless, in this fight the robot demonstrated effective basic functionality - drive wheels made robot move, weapon control (sometimes) made weapon move. (Sometimes the weapon just didn't seem to respond, which is annoying; sometimes the relay switch just doesn't seem to react. Still investigating that...)

After the fight, Eoin (Barróg) made a helpful suggesting, to add some wheely bars to the back of the robot to get a bit more control. We dug into the offcuts bag again and, with some manual reshaping came up with these:
DSC_0591.JPG
Note also the gouges on the bottom corner, courtesy of Tantrum...

FIGHT 2: Midas
This was another robot that looked pretty scary, a 1500N lin-ac driven crusher that looked about 4 times the size of our machine (more on this later). Becky lost the coin-toss and was selected to drive this time. I think the rear skids helped a bit but Ensign Crusher was still pretty undriveable:

In the pub the night before, Simon set us the objective for the weekend of at least starting the second fight. So at this point we had achieved our goal for the weekend, and anything else from hereon was a bonus...

We'd also had a sweepstake between the three of us on the drive up as to how heavy the robot was. We'd very roughly estimated around 8 kg, based on the time-honoured engineering technique of rounding everything up. Sometime around here, Dave the tech checker asked how much the robot actually weighed. I said I didn't really know, but it was probably a bit underweight, so we went to put it on the scales. At this point I became irrationally paranoid that it was going to be massively overweight; turned out I needn't have concerned myself, as Ensign Crusher tipped the scales at a puny 3.2 kg - we could literally have built 3 duplicates and entered them as a FW cluster. That explained the controls being so twitchy at least.

Fight 3: Mattock
At this point I was starting to wonder if I'd offended someone, as we kept getting drawn against all the really mean robots. Mattock is pretty beefy looking and has a really nasty pickaxe. By elimination it was now my turn to drive, so I took the controls with some trepidation. At least I had the second-hand experience of watching Simon and Becky try to drive it.

My take-aways from this fight were, a) we lasted more than a minute and b) we got pushed out of the arena rather than driving out under our power. That's PROGRESS!
However, the robot got pretty banged up in this fight; one of the motors was damaged and had to be swapped out, and one of the wheels got pushed off its hub, requiring some gentle re-positioning using a large G-clamp (I think Chris from Luna-Tic lent me the clamp, so ta!). In addition, though we didn't realise it, the weapon gearmotor was toasted in this fight due to a Good Hit from Mattock. More on this later!

Fight 4: Chimera's Revenge
Sadly Chimera's revenge had to retire from the contest, so we won this one by default. It would've been preferable to have the fight, even though we'd have struggled against another big chunky thwackbot, but I suppose the silver lining is that we had a win of some sort from the weekend...

Fight 5: 8-way rumble
There was some talk of us getting a final whiteboard fight to make up for missing our 4th fight, but in the end we participated in a final melee of all the Sportsmen (Sportspersons? Sportsrobots?), which sounded like more fun anyway. I lost the dice roll so drove again. There were 8 robots in the arena for this one:

Unfortunately we got flipped after a couple of minutes and couldn't self-right. I think the gearmotor could've flipped us back over if it'd been in good condition, but (as I'll show in the next post), it was not in a condition I would describe as good. The last driving gear in the box had sheared in two, hence the sporadic waggling seen at 1:49 - every half turn of the driving wheel, it would catch and turn the shaft, then slip back again.


Overall, we had a fantastic time at Robotdojo. I was really chuffed that we managed to get there with something that worked, regardless of how well we did. I think the Sportsman competition was a great idea; I can't see that we'd ever have gotten around to building a robot otherwise. It's not just that we didn't have to worry about taking the robot home in a bin bag, I also like the fact that the pressure to perform is not too high - it's specifically meant for beginners, so you don't feel like there are too many expectations. That's a great relief when you're not even sure you'll have a robot, never mind a good robot or the ability to drive it competently. So thanks to all the people involved in running the event!