Event 2 - Robodojo 26/09/20

Confident in at least one of my modifications, I headed back up to Leeds for another dose of addictive, intense fun!
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As before I will go over some of the highlights from the event which can be found on Joe Brown's YouTube channel (link to full event below)



As the day panned out, it was clear that the additional front forks worked as intended to be able to lift effectively resulting in 3 wins, 2 losses and an unofficial 4th place for the day. It is always good to see incremental improvements that are a direct result of a relatively simple modification.

The Hells Angel 2 Fight

This fight was by far the highlight of my day. Dave's formidable axebot can cause significant damage and is driven extremely well. Midway through the fight I was having drive problems due to the only non-loctited grubscrew in the entire robot (my bad) coming lose on the left side drive gear. What is clear when watching the fight back, is that I was relatively lucky winning this fight, as up to the very end when Hells Angel ended up out of the arena, I was taking damage and not driving well. The out of the arena came in the final few seconds of the fight and was my only real contribution, but a wins a win.
However I did not get away without a number of axe marks in the robot and it was nice to see that some of the hits were lessened by the use of the scoop as a shield.....

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Dave came VERY close to the link....
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Luckily all of the damage was superficial, so I swapped the lower scoop sections for the repaired ones from event 1 and kept going.
Despite the positives from this event, it was clear that still I need more practice with this robot as the main contributing factor to both my losses was my driving which resulted in getting stuck under the HDPE floor panels. This hopefully has been rectified in my improvements listed below.

Next Steps & further improvements

As a result of facing many powerful axes, it is clear that I needed to better protect the lifter relay wires as well as the area around the link before it gets sniped as was done to a certain toaster .
Therefore, I will be adding a guard to either side that needs to be substantial enough to take hits but not get in that way of either the lifter mechanism or accessibility to the link.
Also as I get more experience driving FeatherDozer, I have come to the conclusion that in addition to practice, I need more low speed control. The F80 speed controllers are a good starting point for brushless ESC's but are lacking in low speed control and with an unfriending way of making adjustments on the fly. So I have decided to have them on standby as spares and use an alternative speed controller setup.

I will go through these modifications in the next entry.