Near Chaos Robotics

[MikeNCR]

Spanky's due for a new weapon pod. Here's an animation of the concept:



Should be right about at real speed.

[Koolaid64]

acme thread?
-Kyle

[MikeNCR]

Yeah, 3/4" dia, 8 pitch.

[Koolaid64]

nice, that will be really strong. what are you cutting the jaw out of?

[MikeNCR]

Blue-ish grey is 1/4" 7075, grey-grey is 1/4" AR400.

[Koolaid64]

The ar is really stiff but I would worry about horizontal stress. I know Charles bent his front lifter supports on clocker in the wrestling match agents Nyx. Are you going to lock them together with standoffs?

[MikeNCR]

Probably won't. The forks on Nyx are also 1/4" AR400 and held up great at Moto.

[Koolaid64]

good deal then. I look forward to it.
-Kyle

[jamisong]

Uberclocker doesnt have any AR on it anywhere tho. And this year it was actually the fasteners that failed out.

[Koolaid64]

ah ok. I didn't get to look close at it, just saw that one went way sideways

[zacodonnell]

It's very Diesector.

It's going to be very fun to drive

-Zac

[MikeNCR]

Trying to get into the habit of posting to Nearchaos.net more regularly. I'm intending to put up a post on a robot combat related topic every other weekend for the foreseeable future.

Here's the first one:

http://nearchaos.net/unrequested-advice-drive-better/

[Lucas Grell]

I like the article; building well is important, but you can have the best robot in the world and you can still lose if you can't drive well.
I've spent a lot of time driving, albeit mostly unenclosed, but I try to set some sort of boundary. Like, when I don't have a weapon/spin it up, I just drive in this hallway intersection at our school. It's a little smaller than the arena I fight in, so I think it probably offers better practice. However, one thing that's nice is to practice on the same type of floor as you'll be fighting on. For example, bots really, really suck on waxed linoleum like at our school. If you fight on steel, practice at least some on steel, even if it's much thinner than what you fight on. It'll still grip about the same, and that can show you some issues you didn't think you had. For example, one of my bots had severe gyroing issues. It wasn't as bad in the test box as it was in the arena, so I had to practice not flipping myself every time I tried to turn...

[zacodonnell]

Trying to get into the habit of posting to Nearchaos.net more regularly. I'm intending to put up a post on a robot combat related topic every other weekend for the foreseeable future.

Here's the first one:

http://nearchaos.net/unrequested-advice-drive-better/

I like the article too.  In my experience, my driving skills are pretty weak, so I have to make it so my bot doesn't go that fast to avoid over-steering. More practice would be good, but with the weapon being a very large part of how the bot handles for my machines it's tough to get real driving practice in a safe way.

If you're looking for article topics, doing one on making a wiring harness that doesn't fail would be a big deal for a lot of new teams. Things like isolating all of the contacts, tying wires down so they can't pull loose, keeping rx wires plugged in, power switches, etc are all very common failures I see with new bots.  I tried a long time ago to write a little blurb about how to troubleshoot bots but I wasn't able to make the flow of the document work because there were too many possibilities. Maybe you could do a better job of staying focused

-Zac

[MikeNCR]

Thanks, I figure the postings will be a mix of tips/advice, progress report-ish things, and general commentary.