Franklin Institute 2016 – The Post-Event and Thoughts on #season3

So now that we’ve gone over the build of Clocker 4, it’s time to talk about how the bot did! The Franklin event was one that I went to the first time last year, and it was quite the experience – if not extremely busy since the whole tournament has to be finished in 1 day.

Everything I needed for this event fit on one handtruck. See? Why can’t we just build 30lbers for BattleBots? Film the whole damn tournament in macro so they look huge!

I was prepared to take a few last-minute MITERS people, so I showed up ready to go. However, plans suddenly changed…

Mr. “I’m not sure if I’m going to go and it’s 9PM the night before the event” decided to take 30lb-SawBlaze. Given its reliance on conventional lithium batteries, we had to really quickly make a replacement battery using 18650-sized A123 cells pulled from my stock, using the last minute MITERS robots’ prep time to do this. This battery furthermore had to fit in the former space occupied by two flat LiPoly packs, so it ended up looking like a weird laptop battery. The vertical cells leaked into spaces the flat packs did not, in order to get some more battery energy.

MegatRON/30-Sawblaze also uses the Axiii motors attached to P60s, incidentally. That means we’re well matched for speed and power. This should get exciting!

Five hours later, we emerge out of hyperspace into the orbit of Philadelphia, only losing $26 of toll money in the process. On the way, I stopped in Manhattan to pick up two spontaneous teammates, Cassandra and Allen-chan (for whom this is public notice towards to put a real damn website together). Cassandra took most of the photos to follow, since I was too busy running around headlessly.

 

All set up and ready at the event, with a pipefessionalism to the left.  The pits at Franklin are always tight due to the space available, so I actually shared a table with Jamison. Getting pointy 30lbers in and out of the aisles was always a dance routine.

What’s that on the back of Clocker? Why it’s chibi-Haru-chan! Join Cynthia in a month of drawing cute chibi-style BattleBots entries!

IT’S ROBOT FIGHTING TIME! In the Red Sharpie Blob, it’s… god dammit Charles, get out of here, you’re not Faruq!

Clocker’s first opponent was Melvin, a modular pushybot with different pushy type attachments. It was a fairly easy target to grab, and I didn’t feel particularly threatened by it so I took the time to get to know the drivetrain better. I got a few good grabs on it, and then….

…whoops. After those good slams, the upper jaw just comes off. Well, this is disappointing, but I can’t say that the dislocated look isn’t neat in its own way. The weak link was the linear actuator’s leadscrew anchor.

I had two 1/4″-20 set screws – the same kind that took out Overhaul – holding onto the leadscrew in a notch, but I guess the force of the lift and clamp crashing down was enough to tear the end of the notch, and off the leadscrew came.

This was resolved by using two oversize drill bits to drill deep dimples into the location where the set screws landed, turning them more into pins. I didn’t have issues with this the rest of the event.

So far: 1/0. Here’s a video of the first match against Melvin!

My next match was none other than Mr. “I’m glad there was still a registration spot open when I got there”, 30lb Sawblaze a.k.a Megatron. This was a spoiler for #season3 excellent driving and maneuvering match that I just barely lost. Having weight on the front of your robot still trumps (We need to find a new word for this activity eventually) any amount of fine compliant wedge tuning, I think. I was hard pressed to attack Megatron head-on, so I concentrated on keeping it rolling over and self-righting, but there were more moments when he had control. Once Clocker was propped on the prongs of Megatron’s plow, it was more difficult to un-prop.

Near the end, Clocker was stuck upside-down momentarily. I thought it was the DeWuts clutching out, but looking at one of the match video angles showed that Megatron had spun off one of the nuts that holds the cross-fork tie rod together, and the tie rod was fallen out and jammed between the forks and pontoon. It took several seconds of forcing it back and forth before it finally bent enough to let me flip back over. However, in that few seconds, I lost significant mojo with the judges.

So far: 1/1. Here’s the exciting maneuvering match!

Some nice sparks coming off Clocker’s pontoons from the sawblade!

After this match, the rear wheels were basically worn flat. This is fairly consistent behavior – a few Motoramas ago, Clocker ran out of wheels. After that, I was replacing the duallie BaneBots 50A durometer wheels once per tournament. This version of Clocker combines smaller wheel contact area with a lot more drive power, so I was expecting to burn them down faster. There’s still a lot of “eraser flakes” going on, so I might want to look into a harder compound or just more durable material. I also openly admit that my casting technique might need some work.

The front wheels suffered less, since they were unloaded somewhat by the pontoons. I’ll add that having the pontoons firmly on the ground was not that helpful – I felt like I had traction issues, but it was really the pontoons and forks making the bot act like it’s front-heavy. It drove much better if I had the forks up a little. This is actually good to know for #season3, and I’ll talk about that later.

Some nice gouge marks in the pontoons from being held under the saw for a few seconds!

This is the cause of the jamming. The threaded rod tying the forks together backed out – most likely due to the saw, given there’s a significant cut mark on the standoff like someone took a poorly sharpened lathe parting tool to it!

Alright, I had maybe 10 minutes until my next match (Franklin runs FAST – you aren’t guaranteed the usual 20 minutes of repair time). Can we change the wheels in time? I brought my pack of spares  that were cast days before. This batch had air bubble problems, clearly visible in the wheel, since I could not locate the makerspace’s vacuum mold degassing chamber. Someone probably ran off with it for New York Comic Con. I was curious now about how the airy wheels will wear down, so I swapped them on anyway.

The next match was against Duck Yeah, a vertical spinning “STD” bot (where STD has now become popular robot slang for Single Tooth Disc). This is architecturally similar to BattleBots like Witch Doctor, Brutus, or Hypershock, so I was excited for this match. I don’t have a good tactic against STDs or other vertical wedged weapons besides “Don’t Fuck Up”.

Well, I did. My penchant for backsliding into head-on assaults did not end well. In fact I fucked up almost immediately, and the pontoons and arms bent up enough for it to be almost impossible to get back under Duck Yeah.

I got tangled in a hit shortly after that which let Duck Yeah go Full Mike Tyson and nip off one of the ears. These ears were definitely more risky than Overhaul’s – I got stuck sideways on them once while the clamp was open and I forgot how to self-right. Overhaul 1 and 2’s self-righting do depend on the clamp being closed past a certain position, which is easy to forget without practice. PRACTICE DRIVING YOUR DAMN ROBOTS!

The bright red glow coming from the middle of Clocker is the clamp motor’s endcap which got blown off in an impact – the brushes are touching and heated to incandescence by the current flowing through them!

Match video here. About midway through, I gave up on lifting since the pontoon edges were mangled and the forks bent, and just drove it around slamming it into walls more.  I won the match on this basis.

 

So far: 2/1

The ear that got nibbled split pretty cleanly along layers. You can also see that the weapon made contact with my clamp motor at least once!

Alright, not much more time until I have to get back in the box, so I quickly swapped a spare clamp motor in. This actuator, thank goodness, is far easier to service than the previous ones!

One thing I did not have was spare forks. This was a pretty severe oversight, as I had the ability to cut them out the week before and dd not do so. I also didn’t have a big enough press, or enough time, to straighten them out again to a degree that would be useful. As such, out comes the angle grinder. I’d rather fight with 1 fork than two are are kind of at different levels.

After this bold move, I try testing the repaired clamp arm and……. nothing. The motor wiggles a whole lot, but doesn’t really move the leadscrew. Uh oh…. I pull the thing apart and discover that it had a totally different pinion. I grabbed a motor for an incompatible drill out of my bin, went “LOOKS OK FROM HERE”, and threw it in the parts box! The gear was similar in diameter, so it “kind of worked”, but really didn’t. Cue 10 minutes of trying to find either a replacement motor or a pinion puller – someone came through with the latter, and I was able to transfer the pinion off the destroyed motor.

The next match was another cripple fight against a decidedly less mobile Melvin. This time, Melvin busted out a thwackbot assembly since they could only spin in place with 1 functioning motor. This was a match where I drove a little harder and went for broke. I had so little time after discovering the motor mishap that I left the ears off. Nontheless, it was a match full of a few full power, cross-arena drives which I had not attempted up to that point. One of these dislodged the bumper inside the arena!

Here’s that match. Near the end, I stranded Melvin sideways on the bumper. I generally have a policy of freeing opponents if they get stuck once, but if I get them twice, I’m done. 3/1 now, and Clocker moves onto the Loser’s Bracket finals (aka the most winning of the losers!)

And who was my next match? A rather crippled Megatron, who just got recently bounced off the ceiling by Big Ripto, in an event which called into question the integrity of the arena. This match wasn’t long – Jamison didn’t have enough time, nor the means, to reattach the plow in a way beyond large quantities of what he calles “Harambe Tape”. Nor was the saw functional. So the plow fell off early on and he decided to call it. Here’s the match from Fred – this put Clocker in the finals at 4/1….. against Big Ripto.

The finals didn’t happen. You can tell because here’s a photo of Clocker still in one piece. The event organizers decided to ban Ripto from the arena again citing the danger of ejecting parts from the roof. This was made known to us when the organizers pulled Kyle and I aside and had a chat about the arena falling apart. While there was some rock-paper-scissors involved, I handed the victory to Kyle unconditionally. There was no way I would have stood a chance in the shape Clocker was in at this point, and Ripto had taken literally no damage. It’s a rock solid design that’s hard to counter, especially when nothing on the front of your bot lines up any more.

I just made the organizers promise to match Ripto and Clocker up first thing at Motorama 2017 next year. By then, hopefully my strategy against vertical weapons will be more evoled. That ought to be funny.

So that’s the story of how Überclocker 4 / 30-haul took 2nd place at Franklin 2016!

On the way out, we stopped for dinner at a place I was explicitly recommended to go for the best Philly Cheesesteak. While I agree that it was very good, we all fucked up on a very important aspect: Not realizing the place offered toppings. Now, up until this point, I had never ordered a geuine Philadelphia-sourced cheesesteak sandwich, so I thought it was SUPPOSED to be just an amalgamation of meat and cheese. Again, this was a very good amalgamation of meat and chese, but it could have had onions, peppers, bacon, more cheese, more bacon, and all sorts of sauces on it for no additional charge. So I lost this round, and will need to correct this next FI.

In the end, how does this event affect my outlook for #season3?  The “lessons learned” fall primarily into the strategic, but there were also physical results.

  • First off, the molded wheels worked excellently. They did wear quickly, but not unusually so. I would have actually accepted consuming a set of wheels per match. That’s actually why Overhaul ended up having so many spare wheels made. So the task at hand is to investigate more compounds and see if one or the other yields better wear life while not giving up traction. In terms of raw traction, I was satisfied. I’ll probably commission a few pull tests on a steel panel covered in the same “traction paint” as used in the box, on a small scale first with promising candidates moving to Overhaul-sized 5″ wheels.  While there were times I thought I had poor traction, it was largely interweaved with the ground force exerted by the forks and pontoons.
  • Speaking of which, I’m thinking some system of continuously adjustable ground force is needed.  Clocker begin the tournament with pontoons slightly too low, and this obviously impeded maneuverability since it preferentially loaded the rear wheels and left the fronts almost unworn – hence wasted. After some big hits, the pontoon edges became worn back and I actually began driving better as evidenced in my second MegatRON and Melvin matches. In fact, this is something Beta has the ability to do. I can pre-load the shock mounts using different height spacers, but it would be nice to have a set that’s adjustable in height somehow. This is to make sure I can perform fine tuning of the contact while Overhaul is loaded up in the test arena for functional verification before the match. I’ll have to think about if this system is worth pursuing and in what form it will manifest, but I want to MACHINE THE PAINT OFF THE FLOOR (so, you know, I can get better traction).

 

  • Likewise, I should think harder about an adjustable hard stop for the arm travel. Clocker 3 had one, but Clocker 4 just relies on the frame rail. This is not adjustable and obviously the zero point will change with damage. Same goes for Overhaul.

 

  • I’ve got a lot to learn about driving strategy now that I’m back in the high energy class. It’s completely acceptable to attack Sportsman’s class bots head-on since the chances of you exploding doing so are minimal, and this has clearly influenced my attack style with Clocker, since the ‘smash and grab’ visual is also an audience pleaser. This is obviously dangerous if you are liable to being fed into a vertical drumlet. I still consider the vertical wedged weapon the most dangerous adversary, given that Overhaul has taken on a high powered horizontal weapon well (okay…. you know what I mean) and Clocker fared so poorly against Duck Yeah. Ripto would have been a disaster for sure.

 

  • It’s very obvious  that I cannot count on every part of the bot lining up to make the front impregnable. I used to drive pushybots with hinged wedges which were lightly pressed against the ground. This, besides not interfering with traction unlike hard-mounted wedges, also affords a chance to escape if you go up on the opponent. In the first battle of MegatRON, Clocker was constantly getting stuck on the attack phase since I would charge into an equivalent charge by Jamison. It was also well evidenced against Beta that Overhaul was hard pressed to escape getting wedged. How to prevent this without compromising the function of the pontoons I am less sure – it could very likely just come down to more strategic driving.

 

  • I furthermore have some thoughts about minimizing my defensive cross section against vertical wedged weapons that I will keep offline for the time being. The upcoming MassDestruction event in 3 weeks might be a good chance for me to test some of the ideas on the beetleweight scale, where drums reign supreme. I’m tempted to build a simple beetleweight pushy-wedge (sigh) to exercise my skills and countermeasures against vertical weapons. (It’s important to note, however, that nothing scales directly; concepts can be expanded, but I can’t magnify everything I did on Clocker by 2x and expect it to behave the same way)

 

 

Completing Überclocker 4 & The Leadup to Franklin Institute 2016

We interrupt this irregularly scheduled build report for VAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNN TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME!

Contrary to most years that I’ve returned from Dragon Con by road, I did not have a job pressing need to return to Boston, so could take a few days to roam around Atlanta. This time, I revisited a couple of old haunting spots from the high school days – namely, junkyards, flea markets, electronics shops (what remained, anyway), aaaaand McMaster-Carr. When it was time to return, I decided to do something which I’d been thinking about for a while, and had been recommended by “car people” friends – hit up the mountain roads of the Blue Ridge Mountains and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Many moons ago, my parents took me on a road trip to Harrah’s Cherokee Casino in North Carolina via some scenic routes such as U.S. 441, and I’d been reading up on the area as of late. Back then, I certainly didn’t appreciate the scenery or natural surroundings as much as I d…. nah, I still don’t, but those mountain curves I remembered as being awesome.

I solidified the plan as diffusing through North Georgia using U.S. 19/129 through Blairsville into North Carolina, then ascending via U.S. 74 eastwards until the intersection with N.C. 28. From there, I would follow the Tail of the Dragon (returning to U.S. 129) and eventually end up in Knoxville, from which it is easy to return to the Interstates. It was an incredibly scenic adventure – I definitely want to return here next year and perhaps try a different tourist trap on the way down – I’m hankering a little for the Diamondback 226.

The careful reader would notice that yes, this means I took a heavily-loaded Mikuvan filled with an entire Dragon Con of robot gear with Overhaul in the back and everything up and down twisty two-land forested mountain roads.

b o d y   r o l l

And bought the “unflattering water slide photo” at the end!

I must point out – loaded heavy in the back with about 500 pounds (Overhaul, all the robot gear and tools, all of Jamison’s robot gear and tools, and whatnot) made the handling and ride better than empty, I’m pretty sure. I tend to throw MV around like a go-kart, and the back end does get light due to the front mid-engine and front driving position. In winters, I regularly keep tools and heavy objects in the hatch to get more purchase during slushy or snowy weather. So I think riding empty might not have been any better, and it’s not like you can actually go that fast on the road while maintaining your lane. It took a few turns to “get it” (and probably warm the tires up a little) before I began really tossing it into the curves. “Continuous tire squeal” must have been concerning to bystanders…

Here’s the whole run from my high-mounted dashcam. Note that this is a very different and weird position compared to most dashcam videos – it’s mounted high up on the very tall cabin, pointed more down than forward, and Mikuvan has no front. Some people actually have said it made them dizzy due to the different motion experienced.

I think around the 3-minute mark is when I started getting more adventurous. Cynthia can be seen trying to constrain herself, her phone (recording a different perspective), and random objects in the cabin.

Anyways, fun times. But you guys came here to see Über-haul work! Here’s what went on in the few weeks before Franklin 2016. In this timeframe, I also went to New York Maker Faire to marshal the Power Racing Series race there again – Chibi Mikuvan came along as an exhibition item, but I didn’t race. I’ll need to post an update about the Detroit and New York Maker Faires at some point.

I did a fair amount of work in the remaining few days in Atlanta. One of the first things I did when I returned was drop by MITERS and use the large drill press to finish drilling some of the frame holes all the way. I then assembled the bot more completely to test the fit of everything.

Verdict: Yeah, sure, whatever. #zerosigmas

One element that has been missing up to this point which you people keep pointing out is that Clocker 4 is missing the classic Overhaul ears. Yes, yes I know, I just haven’t gotten to them yet.

The purpose of the ears on Overhaul 1 were to permit self-righting – the bot had a stable 45-degree-roll upside-down orientation that in testing, we could not get out of. Overhaul 2 addressed that problem a little with geometry, but it was still there – so the ears appear in a slightly different shape. The shape of the ears is a compromise between eliminating this 45-degree stable spot and extending far enough up to tip the bot over once it was fully on its back, using the action of the forks.  OH2 traded some of this latter ‘stickup’ distance for more sideways extension, which is why its ears appear proportionally smaller and flatter than OH1. The tradeoff is it takes a full power swing of the forks to get back over, something I was not too happy about and which contributed to a fair amount of pre-event paranoia in the team.

For Clocker, I wanted to explore the ‘high stickup’ option. This meant the ears have to be shifted forward some to not interfere with making the upside-down stable spot worse. It also makes the bot look very much like some kind of micro-fox or Gundam headpiece.

The ears are designed to be printed using Onyx with additional carbon fiber perimeter reinforcement, so they ought to be immensely beefy. They have to stand being landed on if this thing gets flipped.

I printed these while in Atlanta, but the installation came afterwards. They push into one of the circular cutouts in the clamp arm, have a flange to maintain the tilt angle, and is sandwiched together with 4 bolts.  This configuration means they don’t wrench on the side plates of the clamp arm, which are aluminum and would likely bend, instead bracing each other using the bolted connection… It also hopefully also makes them replaceable. I may pursue a similar strategy for Overhaul this coming BattleBots season, even if the ears are individual weldments.

The chain path for Clocker 4 was never quite decided, but I figured there would be a third tensioner or chain guide involved to force the chain to contact the motor drive sprocket more. This manifested itself in this slip-on tensioner that I designed after seeing the most perfect location for it also coincided with one of the frame rail trusses, so it was easy to make something that  mounted directly on it. Unlike Überclocker 3, it doesn’t have roller tensioners on eggy cams, so is not adjustable in this manifestation, maybe the next one.

Problem: I got paranoid and piled everything onto my scale, and it came out two pounds overweight. Wait, what? The CAD model says 29.5 pounds!

After significant investigation, it turned out that my beautiful PAXi motors were never assigned a finished weight. They each contributed 2.2 pounds to the bot in real life, but were modeled as only 12 ounces apiece…. basically, the P80 parts that I did assign weights for during the design of Overhaul 2….

However, I might actually swap these out before FI 2016 for modified P60s, since having the armor weight back would be nice.

Well then. Turns out I needed more than armor weight! Even eliminating 1lb each would still put the bot overweight. The remainder, I figured, came from wiring (all the 12 gauge adds up) and additional hardware.

Alright, time to borrow a P60 model and smash the AXi onto it.  At this point, I do not own a P60, so I didn’t know how easy this was to do, but it was still 2 weeks out from FI so there was plenty of time to find out.

Since the frame was designed around and cut out for a P80, I actually had to make a P60 to P80 adapter plate. This attaches to the front of the motor using its existing tie rods in counterbored holes, so the front face is flush. The tapped holes are at the P80 bolt circle locations.

A week later, a pile of BaneBots equipment appears. I took the opportunity to also investigate their new BB series gearboxes – Building Block, so named because they feature stackable designs similar to the Vexboxen. I got a BB150 thinking it was similar to a P60.

I was wrong. It’s like a P70 or something, literally almost the middle in dimensions between the P60 and P80. Their BB220 gearbox is the same square size as the P80, however.  Internally, it’s quite massive and a huge improvement over the P60 architecturally, with widely spaced bearings and a double-thick output carrier plate.  I will keep the BB150 around for other applications – it’s too big for this one. Banebots have come a long way from their early brass gear days, but I feel like people never quite let them live that down. The six P80s in Overhaul 2 speak to that well.

THIS IS WHAT ROBOTIC FRUSTRATION LOOKS LIKE.

Mabuchi 700 series motor bolt circle: 2x M4 on 29mm

AXi 4120 bolt circle: 4x M4 on….

30mm.

Look at us, we’re so brushless we need to be just different enough to piss everyone off.

Luckily, “drill out the mounting holes 0.5mm larger each” was enough and the M4 cap screws just barely slipped into the existing counterbores.

To mount the pinion, I borrowed a 0.2357″ (6mm minus 0.0005″, because what are units?) reamer from Jamison and expanded the 5mm bore with it, then pressed the pinion on. This fit is backed up with green Loctite 609 retaining compound. It mildly makes me worry, bu Jamison swears it works… alright, we’ll find out. I’d personally have gone  -0.001″.

Here are the two completed P60 & Axi sandwiches ready to mount in the bot. This setup weighed 19oz each, down from 34oz of the P80 combos, putting the bot at still a half pound overweight.

With the motors now secure, I returned to the parts of the bot I stopped caring about before Dragon Con – namely, the electronics mounting. I first cooked up this DLUX 160 bracket in Atlanta and tried 3D printing a version. It worked fine, except there was not really a way to retain the top one since the gap now crossed by the N shape was open. I closed the gap using the diagonal brace that acts a little bit like a flexure spring.

Now the DLUX controllers take some effort to push in, which is great, since they won’t easily slide around.

The bracket attaches to the bottom of the bot with four #4-40 screws.

Next up? Battery tray. Clocker 3 just cinched the battery to the baseplate but I wanted something more constraining for the full contact 30lb class. Now the battery will sit in a 4-sided tray so it can’t move, and secured using nylon Velcro straps to that. The 4.4ah 7S lithium pack I had been using in Clocker was downsized to a 3.3Ah 6S pack to save more weight.

Clocker is known to work for exactly 1 match on a 2.3Ah battery thanks to FI 2015, and I originally used the 4.4Ah lipo packs because I had them and because Dragon Con matches tended to run back-to-back with minimal repair time.

The reason the tray looks oversized for that 3.3Ah battery is because it’s actually designed to house a row of A123 cells. The Franklin museum does not permit conventional Lithium batteries in anything above the 3lb class, since it’s entirely indoors in a museum and magic lithium smoke & fire cannot be tolerated. So, A123s it is. This means most bots run on reduced power for FI since you can’t fit as much battery into the same location using round cells as prismatic ones.

Pictured is 8 A123 cells. I plan on fitting as many cells in series as I have weight for at the end.

The final 3d printed bracket of convenience is the receiver and other electronics housing. This is taken care of by using the RageBridge lift & clamp controller as a cap! It’s a hollow case secured to the baseplate with more #4-40 screws, then the Rage comes in upside-down and is retained the same way.

After the New York Makre Faire, it’s time to perform the final fitting-out of the bot. Here’s everything being installed in place…

Another experiment I wanted to try in the interest of #season3 Overhaul was tilting the rubber shock mount wubbies to dig the front of the wedge into the ground. Since these wubbies were in a regular pattern, it was easy to put an equally regularly increasing spacer height under them progressively. For weight and lack of steel fender washer purposes, I made quick 3D-printed (this word….. I swear) spacers to test a few orientations. I think they’ll make it into the final assembly because nylon is still far more rigid than rubber – there’s actually no need for steel washers.

It’s coming down to the last three days before Franklin now, and I’ve started mass producing wheels and…………… set screws. I promised to bring a bag of them to the event to sprinkle into the arena. They’re 1.5″ diameter and 2″ tall, made of genuine organic Miku Blue PLA (get yours today!).

Wiring completion was fast, as more than half of was done in Atlanta. I just had to make a few more extensions and replace the 3mm bullet connectors on the AXi motors with 4mm ones. I decided to not make a switch panel for now, opting to just do it like most of my other smaller bots and just plug & unplug the battery cable.

Checking out the weight I had left over, I decided to run a 7S A123 pack instead. I weighed the bot with the FI-illegal lithium polymer battery to establish an upper limit, and then just added as many A123 cells as I could under that limit.

Now, look at that battery and tell me that you’d rather have that bullshit than a professionally made lithium cobalt battery!

And here it is! The finished Clocker 4, alongside a toy Overhaul for even more scaling fun.

But the story doesn’t stop there. At this point, the bot was still around 6 ounces overweight (with the FI-illegal battery, which is 2 ounces heavier than the 7S A123 pack). So I at minimum still had to cut off 4 ounces, preferably more.

I decided the best way to do this was to trim off the inside corners of the pontoons. They’re actually now shaped more like Overhaul’s. The flange on the interior only reaches back about 3/4″, which should be enough to still hide the edges from intruding weaponry. This actually removed about 3 ounces per side, putting me a healthy amount underweight.

Another funny robot exercise: Trimming the pontoon bottoms to be level and also riding flush with the ground. Just throw the whole thing on a belt grinder and have at it!

Just barely under now, with the 3.3Ah LiPo pack and all remaining hardware I could think of added, so I actually have a healthy margin for FI with the 7S A123 battery.

Here’s a test video of Clocker 4 playing with the (still working, just sans actuator) carcass of Clocker 3.

As I point out in the video, it’s way more stable when lifting than I anticipated. Clocker 3 is huge for a 30lber, and it just gets picked up and whammed around almost effortlessly. I was super happy with the speed of the lifter. While the clamp could be faster, the priority was on holding force for this edition with speed only coming from severely overvolting the clamp motor. Recall that the clamp motor is the same as what 12 O’Clocker used for drive this year – I just made sure to order a bunch of spare motors.

Time to pack it up. To come is the event report!