The More Official Launch of Everything, and What’s on the Horizon This Year

It is with the greatest feeling of exhaltation and fear for the future of robotkind that I officially announce the opening of Big Chuck’s Robot Warehouse Adafruit Heavy Industries Co. Ltd. e0designs. Hell, I even went as far as to get stickers.

I’m still flabbergasticulated at how much better everything looks with a generic Avery shippping label attached to it. Get your RageBridge today! Some other potentially exciting products are coming, of course, and these will only get better as more real world usage data returns to me.

With business-business taken care of for now, I’m going to return to ruminating a bit about what *I* want to do now. This year’s already gotten off to a great start, what with infinity sweet-ass machined parts and assembled PCBs and Motorama and junk.

the robot end of things

Clocker’s performance at Motorama was hampered by some typical “teething” issues with not thoroughly tested first-event bots. So, my short term goal is to just get it running reliably. Besides switching first to #25H (heavy) chain, which has by my measurements 33% thicker side plates than the regular 25, I’m also planning on modifying how the legs attach to the frame. The legs just used the threads on shoulder screws to hold the pressure of about 9″ or so of leverage, and those stripped out at the event after a few runs into walls.

Check out those bent shoulder screws with chunks of 1/4″-20 screw thread in them.

Short of finding a way to double support that area, I’m thinking of just massively single-supporting it, making a spacer with a bore of 1/2″ or so and tightening a long screw most of the way through the standoff. Putting that whole region into compression means the leg has to transmit much more force before causing plastic deformation or breakage of the metal. The primary reason behind this is that double supporting was not really feasible without making the fork even narrower due to the positioning of the screw heads, which is something I didn’t want to do.

I’m willing to give one more event to see how the single support performs; if needed, then things will get narrower to fit.

Besides the leg attachment and chain, I intend on rebuilding the clamp actuator. Right now, with a 1/2″-10TPI ACME leadscrew as the primary linear motion element, it suffers a little from nut-and-bolt syndrome where if the clamp runs against a limit, it likes to tighten so much it can’t get loose again!

Clearly suboptimal. What I’m thinking of doing is switching to a fast-travel, high helix angle leadscrew. This would mean I’d have to gear the actuator motor more again, but the output will travel many pitches for one rotation of the screw (or nut). The higher helix angle makes bolting yourself far less likely.

To this end, I bought some 5-start 1/2″ fast-travel leadscrews on McMaster. They go a full 1/2″ per turn!

This is some premium shit – the nut costs $30 and the screw $40. The screw is a higher grade of steel (4140) though, and it’s heat treated, so overall this whole thing will be way more rigid than the current screw.

These changes are all slated to occur Whenever – Clocker will hopefully have monthly jousts and sparring sessions to keep me in practice, so I’m looking to complete these mods in the next 2 or 3 weeks. I’m going to have to pick a new geared motor for the clamp actuator (not in the mood to chop another drill gearbox given their recent quality declination) and also move away from the extremely shady chain drive that is part of the current actuator. Maybe to less-shady chain, but in the best case I’d want to go back to a gear drive.

other bots

I’m kind of itching for another bot again, but it has to not be substantial enough to take attention away from Clocker. Through much discussion at Motorama, I’m going to create a pilot or prototype for something that we want to field later this year (such as at Dragon*Con) or next year at Moto ’14.

That’s it. You’ll have to wait and see.

The Soft-Launch of DeWut and the Motorama Robot Conflict 2013 Recap

So about that Motorama liveblog…

Anyways, now that the event is done and everything has settled into normalcy again, and with the completion of the best user manual / instruction guide I’ve ever made (I think so anyway…), I’d like to make the DeWut publicly available. Get yours today!

At Motorama, 8 of them were run in various fashions. The three in Überclocker, as well as five in a revamped version of Blitz. Five 3-pound motors in a 30 pound bot. That thing was made of motors. Moto was a great durability test of the gearboxes and outputs under various loading conditions. In Clocker, they were indirect driving wheels and gear-driving the fork. In Blitz, however, they were each direct driving a hard rubber wheel. One gearbox grenaded at the event when Blitz took a pneumatic flipper directly to a corner and bounced a few times. Clocker’s fork drive held up great, to my amazement, because there were points during the tournament when I was basically using the fork as a hammer.

DeWut is one of the two love babies I’ve been working on for the past few months (RageBridge being the other…) and it was great to see my parts actually being able to stand up to some use. Speaking of RB itself, I had no issues at all with my two boards on Clocker, but a few other folks were running the beta version and I recovered some of those when they succumbed to strange issues, to be diagnosed. Blitz also lost one production board to suspected thermal overload (from driving two DeWalt motors in parallel with the current limit maxed out) and another due to possibly a metal chip short from drilling the frame. Another bot’s suffered some kind of strange failure where the board itself looks totally fine, powers on fine, but never exits failsafe mode no matter what radio is connected! I’ll diagnose all of those and hopefully find that there’s nothing seriously wrong with my hardware.

Moving, on, here’s what went down at Motorama 2013.

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