The robot drives leagues better than what it did at subterranean with these new tyres and upgrading to 4s. I also switched the ESC from a Tarakan to one of the new BBB dual esc’ and found that the Tarakan may have been current limiting at much smaller loads than intended since the replacement seems to be much more responsive. Not sure if anyone else has had that problem or if the Tarakan is just not good for running 4 motors?
The two main changes were swapping from foams to self-moulded polyurethane wheels and upgrading the drive to 4s which was decided upon as a result of the poor traction and pushing power I had at Subterranean Showdown.
The new wheels are 3D printed out of Taulman 910, with shore 50 PolyTek Polyurethane being moulded onto them. They are connected to the motor shafts via Aluminium Pololu hubs, which I modified to use M4 grub screws as the default M3 ones couldn’t keep them from falling off whilst driving. This did sadly mean that I couldn’t keep the big TPU side panels I had at Subterranean, however the increased grip was definitely a worthy trade off. I also ended up creating two different sized sets of wheels, with one set being slightly larger with the idea that they would be used for non-spinners and opponents where it was important to keep moving, hammer-saws in particular.
I was incredibly happy with the results, especially after comparing the difference between its first and second event. I just gotta bring the anti-horizontal config up to scratch and hopefully it will be enough to go that one bit further at the next event.
Also here are some damage photos
First 4 were from facing Titan and the last was courtesy of Wajoo.
Improvements were on point mate. I see deep tournament runs in your future.
I wonder if you could claw a little weight back for armour configs by ditching the aluminium bulkheads for HDPE or nylon. As much as I like metal myself it would be a great weigh to cut weight by basically a third per part. You could potentially go thicker to gain back some rigidity while still having a net loss for weight.
