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.
Read more “The Soft-Launch of DeWut and the Motorama Robot Conflict 2013 Recap”