Phew! Sub Showdown has come and gone, so it’s time for a writeup! First of all, thanks to the BBB crew for putting on an amazing event, and seeing all the awesome new robots built by everyone else was great!
Joe Brown has been lightning fast with the upload, so you can watch all the fights here!
This year, Sub Showdown gave everyone 3 fights, a 3-way melee and 2 1v1s, with the top 8 going to eliminations. My first fight was Antithesis, a crusher, and Gra-b-ee, a horizontal grabber. I affixed the wide fork setup along with the TPU extra top armour accordingly. Knowing that my weapon wasn’t likely to do too much damage, I opted for an aggressive drive style I think I managed to do that quite well, either pushing one of them into the wall and repeatedly firing my hammer, or lining up hits while the other two were engaged with each other.
Also during that fight was this slick dodge:
Antithesis ended up in the pit as the timer ran out, leaving myself and Gr-b-ee in a split judges decision in my favour! Interestingly, BBB have shown the judges scorecards for this event, and it looks like aggression was what swung it for me!
Having never ran the weapon before in a fight, I decided to check it. Aside from some blunting of the axe head from hitting both opponents and the floor, the belt was also loose, so I tightened the tensioner (which may have resulted in something happening later…) and trued up the points on the axe head. I also changed the turning rates, as I felt I was oversteering a lot.
My second fight was against Blast Furnace, an axe/lifter multi weapon bot. I started by charging at them and got a couple of swings in before the bot lost all power. It briefly regained power when Blast Furnace lifted me up against a wall but it didn’t want to play.
I was concerned that there was some deep electrical issue, but eventually, I found that the fuse wire in the removable link was cut. I suspect that actually happened in the first fight, but the heat shrink was holding the two ends together just enough for a second fight to jostle it loose. The fuse wire was 15A, a holdover from the original Déjà Vu which ran a 3S battery with a max current of ~18A, so I couldn’t run any higher rated fuses. The 4S battery I use now goes up to 45.5A, so I made a new 30A removable link and all was good.
Fight 3 was against Strongerhold, a grabber that was a scaled-up ant that I’ve fought before. The slower low-end turn rate helped me here to keep the front pointed to Strongerhold for the most part. I lost the weapon belt halfway through the fight, I suspect because I had cranked down the tensioner earlier on in the day, but I managed to get a good push and got him into the pit.
I would have entered some whiteboards, but I started having transmitter problems - thankfully, with a factory reset and re-callibrating all the sticks/pots/switches, it appears to now be resolved.
Overall, I am very happy with the bot. It drives like a dream and the weapon didn’t immediately kill itself! I do want to upgrade the weapon to resolve the self-righting issues I had during testing, but I’m happy for it to continue fighting as is for now. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to test it against any spinners, but with Robodojo at the end of the month, there’ll be plenty of opportunities for that!
