Hi all, last weekend I went to the Robodojo December 2024 Sportsman Featherweight event. Overall it was a lot of fun and I’d recommend it.
For those who don’t know, Robodojo is a robot combat club based near York, UK. The venue is a former agricultural storage building in the middle of nowhere, it is fairly easy to get to by car but not ideal for public transport.
- The arena is excellent, with a pretty flat metal floor, pit which descends and good visibility with full height polycarb. It does not, however, have a large viewing area so the number of spectators is somewhat limited.
- The venue has a reasonable amount of pit space for the 14 robots (give/take the one competitor who uses his own pit space in the unit next door)
- The venue is dry and has electricity, but it’s not well heated, so it is fairly cold in December. There are also no tea making facilities (this seems like a major deficiency!) but the nearby Italian Restaurant will do take away hot drinks if asked nicely.
- The tournament was super well run, pretty chilled out and didn’t start too early or carry on too late. Thanks to Andy for being arena-marshall, organiser and everything else.
- The Featherweight “sportsman” rules that Robodojo use are somewhat less restricted than the BBB BEVs rules and allow sharp pointy bits and some spinning metal things as long as they’re not too fast or too heavy (saws are mostly ok, but kinetic spinners are not)
- The tournament format is just a number of round-robin fights (4 per robot in this case) followed by a tie-breaker final for those tied on the maximum number of points, or a rumble for everyone else. This allows everyone the same number of fights.
My robot seemed to work pretty well at the start of the day with new 4S battery, grippier tyres, slightly more weight and some nice green headlights. Unfortunately the gremlins quickly appeared and I had a drive side fail intermittently but repeatedly. Then in the final round-robin fight, my lifter motor destroyed its gearbox and I had a big repair job, which I managed to complete before the final.
Basically it was a lot of fun and everyone was cool. 11/10 would recommend.
Quite surprisingly, my robot, “Petrichor”, did quite well and came in 2nd place overall. This was mostly because of opponents breaking in ways quite unrelated to me driving into them 
Video here: https://youtu.be/KTfXJJb8e5k