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.
The Richardson High School Kids have been hard at work and they have completed an AMAZING full redesign of the Blender. We had some chances to test out its full capabilities before it shipped so I figured that I would go ahead and share some of the footage we took.
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.
