Projects
The Announcer: My First Combat Robot (April 2021 - November 2021)
My first combat robot, The Announcer, was a two wheel drive vertical spinner. This was my first time designing from the ground up in CAD, as well as being my first time working with RC electronics. It was a really fun first big project, but it did have some glaring design flaws, mainly being the lack of wheel guards, the weak weapon mounts, the underwhelming weapon, and being a mess to assemble. The Announcer ended up being around 50 grams under the allowed 450 grams, and I made wheel guards that were within weight, but it was pretty last minute and I couldn't get everything together in time. I'm pretty happy with how it performed overall, and I learned a lot in the process of designing, building and competing. I went 2-2, with my bot's weapon barely holding on by the end. Sadly the footage of the fights has been lost.
Son Of The Announcer: My Second Combat Robot (December 2021)
Son Of The Announcer (SOTA) was the successor to The Announcer in many ways. It aimed to fix a lot of the flaws The Announcer had, mainly a hard to control drive and a lack of internal space for electronics. Because The Announcer had so much weight to spare, I figured I could make it a 4 wheel drive. Instead of remaking the CAD from the start, I took the solid bodies I had already designed for The Announcer then sliced them up and made something new. This allowed me to make a lot of changes and create SOTA quickly and easily, but came at the cost of a really convoluted CAD file where changing minor aspects of the model became hard to do without creating a new sketch and extruding or cutting areas away. SOTA somehow ended up being almost the exact same weight as The Announcer, mostly because it had a lot less volume/surface area in the print. An issue I ran into while testing is that the spinner was really far forwards and I would tilt into the ground while spinning up, which I had to fix by welding on some scrap plastic pieces. I fought a large horizontal spinner which was a really good fight, but some the cheap electronics I was using led to a LiPo fire and a melted chassis. The rest of the fights for that comp were done with an old chassis and mounts melted on with a soldering iron. I would have liked to see how SOTA performed without these issues, but I liked the design and I appreciated having 4 wheel drive, it was a lot easier to control the fights.Â
Takyon: Overhead Spinning Combat Robot (January 2022 - February 2022)
Takyon was named after the Death Grips song of the same name, due to the sheer energy and force of it. My goal with this design was twofold: learn how to use Solidworks, and make an impractically large weapon. This was my first time designing with Solidworks, and the bot was made by creating a file with sketches defined in reference to each other for every part of the bot and individual parts being created using only the main sketches. This was incredibly helpful for easily making changes to aspects of the design with just one sketch and having the whole design change accordingly, but I've found it leads to very boxy designs. The bot sports a 9.5" weapon bar, with dropped impactors on the end to keep the bar from hitting the wheels while keeping it low enough to make contact with other bots. The ring in the bar exists to keep the main length of the bar from hitting the side of the chassis in the case the weapon gets damaged and misaligned. Because this is a really light robot, I was able to get away with doing direct drive for the weapon instead of using belts or gears, and it that was really helpful in saving space in the chassis. I didn't bother with wheel guards, as I figured if I my weapon wasn't spun up I was already losing. Coming in I knew this wouldn't be a very successful design, the spin up time was really long and there was no way for me to self right. In the end only one other person had a bot ready for the comp, which was the mostly undamaged winner of the last comp. We only had two fights, but it was a lot of fun to hit with and I want to experiment more with overhead spinners in the future.
Buzzbomb: Full Combat Antweight (March 2022)
Buzzbomb, named after the Dead Kennedys song of the same name, was designed as a minibot to compete in Norwalk Havoc Robot League (NHRL). Where the last three bots I worked were limited to only printed PLA+ and ABS, I was free to use pretty much whatever material I wanted. At NHRL, 3lb robots get a 1lb weight bonus if they compete with multiple bots, which allows competitors to throw a 1lb bot into the ring at no cost to their main bot. My original plan was to run Takyon alongside someone else for fun, but I pivoted and designed an entirely new bot, Buzzbomb. My main goal with the Buzzbomb project was to get experience working with metal and TPU, which are essential in higher weight classes. I designed the whole bot around a cheap saw blade I bought on Amazon, which put a decent limitation on the weight of the rest of the bot, since the saw used 20% of my allowable weight. Thankfully TPU is incredibly strong, which I learned during the competition after surviving far longer than I expected to. The saw was powered by being compressed between an upper piece and a pulley, which made direct hits to the saw much less damaging to me than if it was run directly attached to the motor. As expected, the bot didn't affect the competition too much, but I hope it made the fights a little more interesting. A lot of my time on this bot was prototyping the weapon, before I printed the chassis I wanted to make sure spinning up wouldn't be an issue. I'm really happy with how this bot turned out and I'm glad I was able to compete at NHRL.
