We got back from the Battlebots on Sunday. Blender Mini turned out to be phenomenally durable and robust however it likes to flip upside down. We are attributing this to it’s high center of gravity and low moment of inertia. Once it flips, it goes into what we started calling the Spinning Top of Death Mode. Due to this, we got knocked out of the tournament pretty early on. We lost our first fight. It was against the team that went on to win the competition. Our second fight was a one hit victory and our third and final match was a loss to the UTA robot. Even though we ended up walking away without any awards, I was pretty happy with the robot’s performance this year. Unfortunatley I am not aloud to say anything about how well Blender did until Battlebots airs on TV.
This is my first semi-stable test with both spin motors. I had to limit both motors to 30% power because of the obvious stability issues. I am planning on taking my shell over to the auto shop tomorrow and seeing if they can hook it up to the tire balancing machine.
Everything in this test goes smoothly until I try to attack the Dewalt Box! Foolish Me! I should have never messed with Dewalt!
This test is limited to 70% with one spin motor.
Here is the first test that I have recorded of Blender Mini spinning. I had the spin speed rate limited at 50% and only have one spin motor hooked up and running for this video. I also didn’t have my teeth attached.
Blender Mini is looking scary powerful. I have spun it up a couple times now and HOLY CRAP! I don’t want to be anywhere near that robot when it is spinning. Take last year’s spin speed and times it by 3. I will get videos up as soon as I mount some new modified spin wheel parts. It turns out that the threads on my spin motors just strip out when I am spinning the robot so I have gone back in and put larger threads in my robot. As a biproduct, I have elimanated all the metric bolts on my robot. Hooray!
Blender Mini is almost done. We found an issue when we spun it up for the first time the other day with how the spin wheels where attached to the spin motors. That is being fixed as I type this. The little bitty CNC mill I have at UTD has been cranking away at parts for over a week now. I want to make sure that I have lots of replacement parts by the time we go to the competition. I will hopefully be putting video up as soon as it all gets tested.
I havn’t made much progress in the past couple of days because of the FIRST robotics competition. We got the plates back from being laser cut on Wednesday (see picture) last week and they will be ready after I go through and countersink all the holes today. Max Morales over at Richardson High School is being amazing yet again and machining my center shaft for us today while I am stuck at work. I owe a lot to Max and I don’t know what I would do without his help and support. The crate team got a lot of the crate cut and ready to be put together the other day. The team also got some T-Shirt designs brainstormed the other day. Other than that, I dont have much to report.
So I am going to just dive right into what I have accomplished in the past few days. I am almost done making the new spinning shell and I got the spin motors mounted on their base last night (see picture). I’m hoping that the rest of our mcmaster carr order comes in today. I finally diagnosed and fixed the problems I was having with the diagnostics board. That does it for this update. Other than all this, I have just been doing school work, Working, and sleeping about once a week.
We are making a lot of progress but we are going to have to make a lot more before this thing is done. Me and the Richardson High School guys took a visit over to Hydro Fabrication (Dwaines Waterjet) on Thursday and got quite a few of the parts machined for us. Dwaine really is a great guy. Me and the rest of the team went over to home depot on Friday and got all the materials needed to build the shipping crate.I worked on assembling one of Blender Mini’s dignostics circuit boards on saturday and ran into an issue with one of the chips.
Blender Mini 2 Shell
I just looked at it with a fresh mind and I think I solved the problem but I’ll have to wait until I actually have the board in my hands to know for sure. On Sunday I wired up all the battery chargers and then I spent several hours cleaning up the robotics lab because it was getting pretty bad. After class this morning I went over to BB Hazel Welding and picked up our titanium shell. It is so pretty. I will probably try and go get the pillow blocks machined tonight now that I have the material and endmill I needed.
Nothing too exciting is going on. I have started machining parts for blender mini. I screwed up on a part tonight when my drill bit decided it was not going to go straight. I’ll restart those parts on friday when I have a chance. I plan on working on the parts all weekend. I want to push through them and get this thing done so I have some time to test things out. Our McMaster-Carr order just got put it. It was a hefty one totalling around $1500. Robot parts ain’t cheep. I have a couple of my team members working on putting together the crate. Hooray for not being a one man team anymore! I have 4 girls and 2 guys joining me now. It will be interesting to see how this works out. It is hard trying to train a team and build a robot at the same time. It is kind of interesting to note that the amount of time it has taken to train them is roughly equal to the time it has saved me on the project by having them work on stuff.
On a side note for any other BotsIQ teams reading this, a contact scoped out the hotels near the event and the best western at discovery kingdom seems to be the best of the hotels near there. Us and a couple other teams are staying there.
That pretty much does it for the update so everyone enjoy.
