Hi!
This will be the first of a few posts over the coming days, just reviewing a few bits and bobs from the last month or so of bop! building and competing.
I’m hoping to put a lil video together soon of the development of the bot start to finish as well as a few fight videos, and also a bop!topsy (haha get it, I’m gonna take it apart and see what’s wrong).
But, for today… let’s carry on from where we got to. I decided to try and give less updates over this part of the build on my page/forum thread to try and keep it interesting when the big rollout came.
There were a lot of cnc antics, to say the least. The version of cambam we were using updated and broke a whole bunch of stuff, hence some of my panels coming out wrong as seen above. Eventually got this fixed up and started to combine bits, including the new wedges from JoeM.
Decorating the wedges was another adventure, I hadn’t thought of how sharpie would run through the print lines, as seen here.
The solution was paint pens, which were super crisp and vivid even when correcting previous mistakes… This wedge remained the spare as the other wouldn’t have the sharpie correcting white pen!
I started having ‘fun’ with belts, something I’ve never dealt with before. In one of these photos, you can see the pulley I cut down, drilled and tapped to fit in the small space.
At this point, I passed proof of mobility (thanks for saving me that day Gaz)
Later, took some deliveries and cut some polycarb…
Some paint and wiring later, we were aesthetically done.
Some fun lil comparisons. I especially enjoy seeing it with my first build, and the photo completing the holy trinity of my beetles inspired by my 3 favourite robots.
After adding a tensioner to get the hammer running (would come back to haunt me in my first comp match!) and finishing some extras here and there (including cutting actual white polycarb extra top plates), we were good to go!
The best place to go for my thoughts on the next bit, and more images of the competed bot at the event, is my fb page.
To kind of re-iterate what I said there, I’ve never been this proud of a build. It really was such a level up for me in my knowledge of different processes and design methods, and I can’t believe how well it came together.
During the tournament, I did try running the snoot (too low) and magnets (made me nervous) but the standard setup seemed pretty fun and great.
I like bop!. I hope you like bop! too. Thank you for reading. Let’s bop! together soon.
For tonight at least, Craig out. 
Whole bot looks like a great design - can’t wait to see this fighting
