Yeah. I'm hopefully going to be fighting some other bots with it on March 26. If you've ever wanted to see what kind of damage that electronics can really take, or you just want to see bits of PLA get flung all over the floor of a polycarbonate box, you might want to keep your eyes peeled.
It is also probably a good time to mention the changes I have made.
The driver is now an L9110S (maybe), the weapon ESC had been upgraded to 30A, and I will soon be doing a recode of the microcontroller sketches running on both the bot AND controller. If you want good (by that I mean it's so bad it's good) NRF24L01/robotics reference material, check out the bot's GitHub.
Please tell me you've got rid of the breadboard inside the case. I imagine the electronics will fall apart the first time it's hit if it's held together with breadboard.
Those photos are very old and from prototyping. I've since upgraded to a full wiring harness. No connectors to be weak points, just solder joints and wires.
EDIT - The top is kind of sketchy and thin but there's zero vertical spinner bots that also have the spinner on a moving arm, which also have enough speed to catch up to my relatively slow drive velocity, that are also in the plastic weight class, that are also competing in the event I'm going to.
Hello everyone! Flash Memory had a 2:2 fight record. 2 losses against a nasty overhead spinner that got 2nd place with a 4:2 record and 2 wins against experimental bots, both of which ended up with 0:2 fight records.
I had ZERO electrical failures aside from some firmware issues that seem to crop up every couple of power cycles.
Also there was a misunderstanding at the beginning where I accidentally loaded into the box instead of another bot. It was my first event
Flash Memory VS Eclipse: 9:49 | Loss
Flash Memory VS Order Up: 45:50 | Win
Flash Memory VS Deadhead: 1:26:40 | Win
Flash Memory VS Eclipse (again): 2:06:33 | Loss
Overall I think it did pretty well. On the last fight you can definitely see those firmware issues. The bot keeps trying to move backwards. I might have to switch to an H bridge again.
Improvements for next time:
Less spokes on the wheels. Eclipse in the last fight managed to hook around one of the wheels and rip part of it off because I only had 2 spokes, leaving a bunch of open space.
Silicone tires. They stay on better.
Hybrid PC/PLA weapon. The weapons that sat around the motor were great but kept exploding. Next time I'm going to make the "hanger" part out of PLA and the disc out of laser cut PC and screw them together.
PC bottom panel. When Eclipse ripped off my weapon motor it was because the PLA chassis was super weak and broke. Eclipse's weapon is hook-shaped and grabbed the motor and ripped the whole front off because of PLA's brittle properties. You know what's not brittle? Polycarbonate. I'm going to make the bottom part out of laser cut PC and screw it to the PLA chassis, which doesn't need to be that strong because it's armored by the drive motors.
Broken firmware. After a couple of turn offs and turn ons the firmware would go bad as could be seen when I loaded in during the last fight. Not sure why this would happen but I have a feeling it has to do with my brushed motor driver which I'm probably going to change to an H bridge.
Things that did work:
High capacity battery. My slow drive motors meant that I needed all the power I could get to keep them at an acceptable speed and the batteries delivered. I only lost about .2-.5V per fight.
The Arduino! It worked without too many issues and I'm very happy with it.
Big wheels. I managed to get out of the "pit" that was out of the shot. There was this 1" high wall in the corner that my huge wheels allowed me to get out of.
Well. That was fun. Next fight's in July. Not sure if I'm going there or not.
EDIT - By the way. The brushless weapon motor that came off just before I tapped out in the last fight still works.
