Team Cosmos - Angry Accountant - A New Beginning.

[Lucas Grell]

It looks solid! Can't wait to see it with a new weapon! What size motors are you using for the weapon?

[Coboxite]

Damn that's pretty.

[satacoy]

The motors I'm playing around with all are 28mm in diameter, just varying the height of the can.  I'm shooting for about 2000 rpm per volt, with a 2:1 reduction, so I should end up around 7k rpm.  It feels about right when spinning up.  It won't be at the crazy end of the rpm scale, but enough to do some damage.  The goal with Angry has always been to come back for more until the other guy breaks, not necessarily a one hit kill.

Pete - Team Cosmos

[satacoy]

I managed to squeeze a belt cover under the blade.  Let's see those pesky drums knock my belt off now!



Pete - Team Cosmos

[daggius]

Looks nice.  What inspired the name?

[satacoy]

My special lady friend happens to be an accountant.  And she's occasionally angry.

Pete - Team Cosmos

[satacoy]

Progress has slowed down a bit, but I'm making a bit here and there.

Here are the electronics wired up and working.  Things barely fit in the body, it's a tight fit.  Note the classic electrical tape, hopefully preventing shorts of any sort.

I can drive angry around via a telnet session, but that's pretty rough.  Next step is to write a test program so I can have more intuitive controls.  I'll post some video once I have that working.



Pete - Team Cosmos

[satacoy]

I added a motor guard with a bit of the weight I had left over.  Things are pretty protected at this point, have to admit that I'm happy with the design.  I have almost an ounce left for weight, I'm still toying what to do with that.  I still need a new weapon blade, weapon shaft, and a few holes in the top plate for power access and radio use.



Pete - Team Cosmos

[MikeNCR]

Might be worth putting some sort of cover over the bearing to keep arena crud out of it.

[satacoy]

I just realized I never really closed this topic up.

The electronics work on Angry 3 took a long time.  I switched from using Bluetooth to a normal 2.4ghz receiver.  It was smaller, gave me channel data on a single PPM line that I could decode with the Arduino, and didn't have any binding issues, unlike the Bluetooth module.  Soldering the drive ESCs, the brushless weapon controller, the Arduino, and the receiver into a tiny 1.3" X .85" X .65" cube was challenging.  I shorted something out twice, blowing up a few components in the process.  The third time was the charm.

I competed at the SparkFun AVC contest in September.  I had some driving issues, Angry didn't like to drive straight.  But she stood up to some big hits.  There was some cosmetic damage, but all-in-all did well, getting 3 wins and 2 losses.

I'm planning on heading to RoboGames in April to compete with her, and it sounds like another Ant/Beetle competition will be held in Boulder in April as well.

Meanwhile, I created a Team Cosmos Facebook page, and have been posting updates there.  You can find that here:  https://www.facebook.com/TeamCosmosBots/



Pete - Team Cosmos

[jamisong]

I love seeing nice and tidy electronics layouts

Looking forward to the next adventure! That should be moto right?

[satacoy]

I'm getting more optimistic about making it to Moto, it looks like the timing will work out.  Just as a spectator though.

Pete - Team Cosmos

[jamisong]

I'll take it. Been looking forward to meeting you half my life

[satacoy]

I'll take it. Been looking forward to meeting you half my life

Don't get worked up too much, I'm not that impressive in real life.  :-)

Pete - Team Cosmos

[zacodonnell]

Hey Pete, it was great to finally get to talk to you in person at Motorama.  I've been using the Team Cosmos KE calculator for a while (both the original version and the revamped version). I like to gauge my designs against the known performance of old designs, but with the shell spinners it is always hard to model the weapons accurately.  For the longest time I was never able to get the numbers my cad software produced to match the numbers you guys produced and tonight I finally figured out why: units are fun. 

The struggle has always been to figure out what the conversion factors were between what my software produced and what your page shows as the unit.  I think there may be a typo on the page. It lists the MOI of a part as MOI: -0.251 fp/s^2.  It could be that I just don't understand what that unit is, but it looks like foot-pounds per second squared, or maybe pounds of force per second squared. The trouble is that MOI is in mass-times-area units and there is no time component. Is it possible the cosmos calculator was supposed to say lb-ft^2? If I treat the value as that unit then my cad software (which produces values in lb-in^2) matches after converting the units.

-Zac