With the Mars brushless motors sadly seemingly going the way of the Dodo, it seemed like a sensible choice to redesign Cascade to use motors that I could still get off the shelf, as it is a robot I can see myself running for the forseeable future due to the upgrades I have planned for it (will update that page soon). I however still had 6 mars motors in storage ready to use, and it would be a shame to see them go to waste as they are quality motors, so I decided to make a secondary robot out of them.
Since the supply of these motors is finite, I wanted to design something that wouldn’t take a large amount effort to manufacture. This meant no large thick aluminium pieces I have come accustomed to in all my builds, with the few aluminium parts being relegated to just the motor mounts and the bottom panel. I decided that as a change to my regular design philosophy, the majority of the frame would consist of HDPE. I have slowly incorporated HDPE into some my more recent robots such as Clump and Cascade, and have become a lot more confident in designing around some of its main weaknesses, the main ones being reduced thread strength and lack of rigidity in comparison to aluminium.
I still haven’t found the urge to fully commit to a spinner yet. I have one designed and the initial goal was to get it built in early 2026, but upon reflection I ended up going against this as I’ve gone too far down the control bot rabbit hole to convert to not so controlled chaos. I ended up designing yet another lifter which uses, you guessed it, another 37mm Pololu brushed gearbox motor. These motors are just too reliable, I am still yet to break one and like the mars motors I have a couple lying about so it would put those to good use. In terms of the type of lifter I wanted to design, I am a really big fan of Dylan Stanley’s robot Chucky, and ultimately decided to create something inspired by that.
After some CAD, and many hours in the garage tinkering I came up with this.
With it having bull dozer like characteristics I ended up going with a yellow and black colour scheme mirroring whats found in JCB vehicles.
Overall I’m beyond pleased with this. Most of the design was based on what I thought would be fun vs what would be more practical. There are certainly some aspects I would change if I was designing it to be as competetive as possible, mainly referring to the moment forces involved with lifting as it is likely to topple forwards in some lifting scenarios.
First event with it will be Dortmund in about a months time. Never been to Germany so robot fighting made a great excuse for me to go. Whether this robot progresses past that event depends on how many Mars motors I lose.
PS - Don’t crucify me for using a link, its in the Dortmund rules I swear