Tavares Labs

Long story short, I can’t seem to justify the cost of both time and money of attending Battlebots this year with no robot. So unless someone wants to pay my way, I won’t be attending. It is a real shame too because I have a high speed video camera now.

On a separate note, I have delved into several projects in my free time. I got my hands on an old friendly robotics lawn mowing robot that I am retrofitting to do some interesting things. I am also gathering supplies to make a coffee table with thousands of controllable LEDs in it. In addition to those projects, I found myself playing with salt water batteries and electroplating last night. Only time will tell if any of these things will come into fruition.

Need to know where I am? Check out where.TavaresLabs.com! It should update every half hour or so unless my phone runs out of batteries.

I bought a 2 liter dewar flask on eBay today…

Pretty much their only use is to store liquefied air. What does that tell you about what I am up to?

So I moved into my own apartment a couple months back. That wouldn’t be worth mentioning here except for the fact that I now have two garages! One for my jeep and the other for my tools! I took advantage of Black Friday and got myself a huge shiny new craftsman tool box. Of course what use are tools without a place to use them. So I then proceeded to get some workbenches and stools. I will get my CNC mill and possibly my CNC lathe out of storage when I can get a buddy over to help me move them. This is going to be a serious workshop when everything is said and done.

For anyone wondering about Blender Mini, it is not going to happen this year. A massive redesign (you will see) coupled with the trouble of getting sponsors in an economy like this gave me the excuse I needed to take this year off. As for RHS’s robot, I am not going to be the one to spoil any surprises they have in store.

For anyone related to Battlebots who has been living under a rock, the air dates for last years competition start december 10th at 9:00 PM ET on CBS College Sports according to the official battlebots twitter.

I have not updated in a while so I figured that I should probably break the silence. For anyone that is interested, I got a new job this summer at Vercét LLC. As for what I am working on right now, I have a couple projects in the idea and early planning stages right now. I have some ideas for some smart house systems, flying robots, and possibly a new liquid fueled rocket engine swirling around in my head.  I am going to leave the details  for another time, mostly because I haven’t figured them all out yet.

The UTDallas Battlebot Team

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.

The whole site is currently being built once more from the ground up. This will make for the 8th Major revision of what was originally called Inertia back in 2001. I am not only rebuilding the look and feel but the back-end is all new and I just finished doing two weeks’ worth of battling IT departments getting my website switched to a different server. All in all, I think the new website will be phenomenally better than the last one.

As promised, Here is the new website I am currently designing.