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Thread: Hornet 2

  1. #1
    I thought I would use this section to give a history of hornet 2 from its original conception and over the next week or so let you know what plans I have in store for the machine so you all know what you will be facing at the tag champs.

    Hornet 2 funnily enough was the second featherweight I ever built. The first being, imaginatively named, hornet. A pic of the machine is below. It was basically a scaled down version of the heavyweight I built at the time called Swarm. Both machines appeared at the Roaming Robots UK champs a while back but neither did well as they were both completely littered with design flaws and problems which are only too apparent to me now. But I learned a lot from both building those machines and the event. It was the first event outside robot wars that I attended and boy was it an eye opener!

    Some may recognise the hornet chassis as I sold it to Jamie and it became the basis for drumroll. I have got the chassis back and have plans to bring back the original hornet for whiteboards and fun events.

    I headed off to uni and between all the drinking and partying of 1st year I started thinking about designs for a new machine. I realised at the time that bar vortex, there hadn't been any majorly good vertical spinners. So lets try something new!

    I have the original CAD models somewhere on my old laptop which I will get off as soon as I get a new power supply for it. The original hornet had a 2 toothed disc power by a magmotor. A victor controlled the magmotor and the top and bottom panels were made from HDPE with the rest made from aluminium. The end bulkheads which shattered in the first battle were made from polycarb. At the time the pulleys were steel and even after removing as much material as I could they still weighed a combined kilo! A fair bit of weight for a machine that weighed 12kg!

    From its first outing I could see it had potential but needed a lot of refinement. First thing to go was a tooth on the disc. I had got two discs made originally so I took the second, cut a tooth off and rebalanced the disc. Major improvement to the machine. I got two custom ali pulleys made for the disc at a cost of around 130 quid which saved around 700g in weight. Great time for some more ali to beef up the chassis. The victor shorted in the first event and so I decided to go to solid state relays. Only ever blown one of them since.

    Second event, one set of batteries gone. Great time for new ones. Got the same high spec model nicads again. Unbeknown to me, these were holding back the true potential of the magmotor. The HDPE disappeared for aluminium and I put some bulkheads inside to re-inforce the chassis. The weapon assembly still worked well so I kept it as it was.

    From this point on I swapped out the ali for a titanium chassis. Much stronger and able to take the knocks far better. The one part of the machine I always got comments about was the exposed drive at the rear. To date I have yet to have anyone take out a wheel completely (theres a challenge for the tag champs )

    4 events on and another set of batteries gone. These ones shorted on the chassis due to a wire being cut from a impact when the batteries moved. Time to go for some A123s.

    Rebel robots came along and hornet looked better than ever. New 10mm ali bulkheads to replace the boxy old ones. New A123s, new speedo and new paint job. The machine looked and handled better than ever. Then a major flaw was shown when Tony took out a bulkhead. 4000rpm disc whipping around inside the machine smacking into the mag, stalling it and drawing a huge amount of current from the A123s. This was a major let down but as ever it just meant that I hadn't designed the machine well enough so back to the drawing board.

    I had to replace the magmotor housing as the magnets had shattered and moved, the A123s were near enough shot but I didn't have the cash to replace them and the magmotor shaft now wobbled but after around 100 hours of work I threw hornet back in the arena for its best event to date. I had welded together a new hardox scoop front which completely re-enforced the weapon assembly.

    7 or 8 battles (can't remember exactly) and even after going in a match with two horizontal spinners, hornet is still mechanically sound. The A123s are completely shot and need replacing (thats an average of 2 events per battery pack!), I need to get a new speedo as I borrowed the sidewinder and a new radio controlled relay is needed.

    So another few hundred quid and I will have hornet ready for the tag champs at the end of the year. There is a fair bit of detail that I haven't had time to put here but I will put it down in the coming weeks when I have spare time and throw in various pictures etc.
    Attached Images Attached Images

  2. #2
    Lol, I think I bought those SLAs in Hornet 1 off you as well back in 2006 if I remember correctly. Were in Kaizer Mk.1 for the UKRG that year. They've long since been donated to the battery disposal unit at the local skip

  3. #3
    Update -

    - Brand new A123s have been ordered from Hong Kong at a fiver a cell....Thank god for ebay!
    - Two new electronize controllers have been acquired from my finished underwater ROV uni project. The fact that I ordered them and the uni paid for them has nothing to do with this acquisition
    - The large dents in the 2mm titanium from Newcastle have been mostly removed although its never gonna quite look the same again (thanks Tom and Tony :P )
    - Still to order some heatshrink and battery bars for the new battery pack

    The plan for the tag champs is to run my drive system and weapon system off two seperate battery packs. The drive will be changed to 9.6V drills running from 2 A123 cells with the magmotor being run off a further 8. I am going to investigate a large fuse to be run inline with the batteries should I have a problem with the disc being jammed again.

    For those that aren't aware I am soon to be the proud owner of a new disc mechanism which I have still to design the body around but suffice to say, its going to be something special.....watch this space

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