Because @Jack bullies me if i don’t make forum posts 
Bulbaroar, the story so far, mostly in CAD. Part 1 of X
It all started with Hooligan. Which was objectively terrible and made me sad when it sucked repeatedly so got scrapped. 6 months later I was looking to make another spinner and started CAD’ing up a beater to get CNC’d in china and realised I didn’t want to spend £100 on a part which may be awful, or be on an awful robot, or generally be pressure.
So got this added to a lazered order. it’s a 10mm thick 70mm chunk of ‘Hardox 500’.
The rest of the bot came from my spares shelf. LIke many people here I get carried away in times of plenty and had sever robots worth of unused spare mars drives, drive esc’s, some unused 70A weapon esc’s so decided to put it all to use in a ‘budget, use up your shelf’ kind of way.
Origional plan was to take it to the East Essex Hackspace, chuck it on the massive industrial lathe they have there and turn the ends down, but we had a hell of a job trying to centre it in a 4-jaw chuck enough that it would be actually centred not “rougly close”. It was pretty badly kerfed so we eventually gave up and bounced soem ideas about, eventualy thinking "why not just print some round bits and stick on bearings.
Quite rapidly from there I designed this weapon stack and started on the real work.
The V1 CAD. Around this time BBB Summer Showdown was announces so i decided to rush build the bot as a pokemon theemed eggbeater for my kid to drive, so i’d have a less stressful day. (Yeah, right)
I’ve no photos to hand but v1 Bulbaroar was born just in time for ShowDown though what came next was a bit tough for the wee lad. It didn’t drive very well, the puit was broken and stuck down and the draw was what we call “spicy” but ended on a high (though went the distance for a JD loss) to Fang Reloaded.
Roll forward a monthior two and MITE II was announced and after checking with the EO’s it was OK to bring 2 bots, polished up the upgrades to Toucan after Rapture and turned my mind back to Bulbaroar aiming to give it “one more event before binning it”.
This utter abomination was born. The mid wheeled 2wd Bulbaroar. Oh jeeeez wher to begin.
Firstly there were enough good bits to make thigns good. It really, really hit stuff hard. Bounced a few bots off the ceiling hard. Sadly it drove really badly again, was imbalanced and the massive 65mm direct drive side wheels had a habt of shattering the Mars gearboxes they were attached to. Still it went 2:1 got into the RO8 playoffs then died to a brownout. Same RX from Hooligan. that went in the bin. The mid brushless motors with weapon belts over the top plan was also terrible. it ripped wires our of a brushless drive motor
oh well. it was fun and i returned from the event with a smile and some mojo.
Chetted with @Joe and swapped my Champs entry to this bot and set about CAD’'ing up some fixes. Keeping it 2wd but moving the wheels and motors back to the back, slipping them inside the chassis, wrapping the rear in TPU was about all it needed. Behold - Bulbaroar 1.3. The pride before the fall.
Suffice to say it did my usual champs thing of laying waste to all before it in the Opener, then getting flat out murdered in the first RO32 bracket fight. Still it had a great WB before going home. It still hit, but doesn’t drive well. Undeterred i fixed up the worst of the damage and went to RoboDojo a few weeks alter and came 6th out of a pretty stacked field of 12. Again, the drive was the main problem. Oh and sniper hitting it so hard the chassis pulled out and dropped the weapon bar. apart from that it was great. hmmmm.
Overall the damage wasnt’ too bad but after 2 heavy events in a few weeks I left CAD alone from mid Nov until early Jan. Robots are stupid.
