Tavares Labs

We have just finished designing the second version of the Blender Mini over here at UTDallas. For anyone who dosn’t already know, Blender Mini is UTDallas’ entry into BotsIQ (Battlebots). My team is currently putting together prints for the machine shops. This year’s robot will be using the same spinning shell as last year but that is where the similarities end. Everything from gear ratios to material type has been re-examined and optimized. The entire internal chassis has been completley redesigned. I will keep this site updated with the latest build info.

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.

When the school asked us to build a t-shirt launcher for football games in 2006, they didn’t have to ask twice. We immediately set to work. As high-school students at the time, we jumped at any project that had the possibility to explode or catastrophically fail. What we ended up with was a 250 pound beast of a machine that could barely keep the shirts inside the stadium at 25% power. Everything on the robot is controlled remotely. The robot has two pneumatic systems. The first runs on 120psi compressed air that is generated by two on board air compressors. It operates all of the reloading cylinders. The second system runs off of a 20lb CO2 tank and operates the main launcher. It is regulated to anywhere between 15 and 130psi depending on whether we would like to shoot the t-shirt into the stands or into orbit. All of this takes quite a bit of battery to run. We use two 12 volt sealed lead acid batteries that give us 2-4 hours of run time depending on how much driving and firing it is doing. Since our original build, they did a overhaul of it in 2008 (pictured) to make it a little faster and fit through doors a bit better. I still need to post video worthy of this creation.

Considering the fact that I had never made a 15 pound battlebot before, I decided to experiment with my first one. I tried a lot of ideas that others had said would never work, but no one had ever actually tested. Some of the ideas like cutting slots into the side of my titanium shell where wonderful successes. Others however, like printing my chassis on a 3D printer where not so good. In the end, I was pleasently surprised that I ended up with more successes than failures and even more pleasently surprised when I won second place in my division. So now I have the knowledge I need to create a really kick ass robot this year.

Just like any other design, the blender had to be refined. The first year was full of drive train issues and we constantly had to hammer the aluminum shell back into shape. So the next year we came back with a titanium shell and different drive train, only to find out that our batteries and teeth where not durable enough. So the next year we came back with custom made battery packs and a new tooth design only to find out that our titanium shell was too thin. Without learning these lessons, we would never have been able to develop blender into the machine it is today.

When you can coaxe the titanium gods into behaving themselves and hold your tongue just right you end up with a true masterpeice. This 24 Volt, 14 Horsepower monstrosity was just this. It not only won first place but it took home the coveted Best Engineered award as well. To this day, we are the only team that has won the Best Engineered Award Twice. We are one of only two teams who can claim they have won the Best Engineered robot award twice. (thanks to Paul Ventimiglia for the correction) Suffice it to say, 2007 was a good year.

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