I love the ramp up in complexity from bigger wheels, to a wedge that touches the floor right up to spring flipper.
Not meaning to rain on your potential parade but how exactly do you plan on doing this? And are you absolutely sure that a reliable, powerful servo powered flipper wouldn’t be more fun, affordable and achievable.
With a bit of cleverness with linkages this would be chucking with the best of them
Just a weird idea my dad came up with. It’d be easier to do a normal one since my dad also stole the blueprints for them from the other competitors as the event. For the next rock and robots I’ll likely just add one some plastic forks and something on the back to stop it from tipping up if the electrics aren’t shover into the front hard enough.
I’ve got a link to the event here. I also need to send the link to a friend who wants to know what on earth I was talking about on the way to/from the week long scout camp I just got back from.
Seal Of Approval update 1.1 patch notes:
Increased pure rage by 200%
Fixed an issue where the googly eye side quest couldn’t be entered
Fixed an issue where the front would come of the ground when accelerating rapidly
Increased number of whiskers by 50%
Replaced solid wedge plastic with 3 forks
The purpose of this patch is to add character development (SOA is angry it only went 1-3 last time), look “better”, improve ground game, stop that tilt thing it did and allow entry into…
The most important side quest in any robot competition is, of course, the googly eye game. There are lots of ways to play it, such as sheer number, hilarity of placement and so on, but for the purist, the only game is who has the biggest.
-Sam Roberts
He then went on to build a robot that was entirely googly eye to win said contest, becoming the greatest googly eye person of all time. I should win with googly eyes at Rock And Robots, since no other robots had any when I went last time.
My prediction for Sunday is that I’ll go 2-2. That or better and SOA will no longer be angy.
Sounds like an excellent continuous improvement program you have there! Hope your developments bear fruit and good luck with the googly eye challenge. 
Additional:
Increased tyre size
Increased bottom panel wheel hole size
We’re cooking with 44mm now!
Nice! In my limited experience bigger wheels is always better, especially for pushing!
Remind me to never use those big wheels again. During testing it shot up uncontrollably and eventually did the thing on it’s back. It’s not like I can just swap around the wheels as it took at least an hour to close it back up afterwards. My prediction for this event: 0-4. After this incredible failure in planning and general roboteering SOA may have to be retired months, possibly years before it’s planned retirement.
Gentle on the sticks, even limit them if you can in the settings
How did I go 0-5? I thought that the thing this morning was just a good old 1am “lets review your mistakes” moment! Redesign needed, since a motor burnt out and replacing it would take at least an hour, a hard feat with my current motivation to do anything really (and I’m eating an apple right now).
It happens! I wouldn’t get too disheartened, at least it’s all up from here.
I’m wondering if you could get us some closer pictures of the construction of the robot as it’s been relatively hard to tell. In an ideal world components should be accessible and swappable within about 10 minutes as a goal. Having a screwed/bolted access panel or lid might be a good start to get to the guts of the machine.
I’m already planning a major redesign. 10 minutes is too long for this event, time between fights is around 30 seconds.
What I’m doing is I’m using jumper cables between everything so I can swap out anything very easily. I haven’t seen anyone talk about this but I don’t see any downsides to it.
They certainly work at ant scale, I guess there’s just a bigger risk of them unplugging on a big hit than a JST or a MR30 etc
You can try wrapping a bit of electrical tape around the connection to help it, then just remove the tape when you need to disconnect it.
No need to worry about big hits. I’m getting to work on a design that’s 4 panels. Main, back and 2 forks. The back is only there to put a lil’ seal face on and so it isn’t an oversized computer chip with forks bolted on. You’ll have to trust me that it makes sense, let me cook!
The final image of this version of Seal Of Approval. Pictured next to the new chassis parts, I had trouble getting the image to work, so trust me when you ctrl C and V that jpeg
SOA (Seal Of Approval) will return upgraded. Unfortunately a fork just went missing, but otherwise everything’s running smoothly.
Edit: Image doesn’t work. Oops…
After remembering the box of nuts and bolts didn’t discombobulate when I finished the old SOA chassis, I’ve kept it to hang on my wall (if I decide to) to strike fear into the hearts of my enemies. If that is the fate of an ally, how bad will your one be?
Oh and here’s the footage of rock and robots 10, ahead of the 11th this weekend.
But that’s after surviving my first 2 days of year 9 at school. The new school year starts tomorrow for me. Wish me luck.
(Also fun school fact about me my science teacher on Thursdays helped build the robot Infinity (not the Dutch one) but he wasn’t on TV so the Wiki doesn’t say about him. Sorry for the side tangent!)
Seal Of Approval is finished ahead of its 3rd event! I just need to add the fur and seal face. The wheels are still WAY too powerful. I’m hoping that by putting all the parts in the front, the effect won’t be as bad. SOA faced something similar at its first event.
It seems whatever allows my chromebook to save photos as a file isn’t working…
Looking back, the original was cuter.
Looking great! The original was cuter but I’m sure it will be just as cute as the old one after you put the fur on! It’s really starting to look dangerous!
Edit: For my robot putting the battery as far front stopped my robot from doing wheelies.
