Category: dumb robots

robots only

Stance Stance Revolution 2 at Motorama 2024: Yes, It Did Happen!

chorl

Quick note: I re-organized how the individual project threads were categorized on the left sidebar. Yeah, “Done!” and “Not Done!” stopped being useful some time in 2009… But hey, the best time to make a change was 15 years ago and the second best time is now. Everyone’s grouped by type of build, whether it be van or robot or silly scooter. My next insurmountable multi-year sit down for an hour challenge is to update the static pages and make new ones.

Many moons ago, I finished a Stance Stance Revolution. I did in fact go to Motorama right after the fact, even if I’m years late with the event update! In fact, another entire Motorama is happening right this moment, but I’m sitting this one out due to having focused too much on Real Life and the Robot Trap House, not getting around to putting either SSR or Susquehanna Boxcar back together yet.

So, after Vantruck’s “redemption trip” in 2022, and doing a clean in-and-out with Coronavan in 2023 due to surrounding life and work obligations, it was obviously time to debut Operation IDIoc….

Nope, guess who hasn’t been above the Mason Dixon line since 2019? I decided it was Mikuvan’s turn to make the run back up to my weird culturally adopted second home (as my friends joke all the time that I’m a closeted central Pennsylvanian).

At this point in time, I hadn’t yet trusted Vantruck enough to make the long trip to Harrisburg. In retrospect? It would have been just fine. But I decided risking it at the time wasn’t worth the cascading costs – see, at least the Tail of the Dragon was within one AAA tow radius, and with Mikuvan they don’t have to send out a different truck after finding out the first one was too small despite me telling them exactly what it is.

Somewhere north of Roanoke, stopping both for lunch and to peruse the hardware store for stuff I forgot to bring, such as….

… a weapon lock for Stance Stance. I grew fond of using these big D-style hitch pins after doing it for Sadbot for Comicpalooza. I just got one big enough to thread through both discs at once. Bringing it into the store and test fitting pins one by one definitely drew a lot of conversation, and there were even some BB watchers!

The rest of the trip was completely uneventful, which is an abnormality given Mikuvan’s history of enjoying the Shenandoah Valley scenery just a bit too much. I cruised into Harrisburg around dinner time and got my usual hotel room at “whoever still has vacancy and not bugs”.

Here we go! It’s Saturday morning and everything’s passed inspection. I got to drive it in the real arena surface it’ll be on, and I confirmed that the worm drive was a surprisingly good idea. Weapon spinup was rapid, a consequence of me designing more for torque than raw speed because I’ll likely be using these things as reaction wheels often.

The only issue was the roughly 3mm of ground clearance. That was not something I could make better on the fly here, but I figured I’d use the weapons as said reaction wheels if it got hung up briefly.

The first fight was against a two-part multibot, two little TPU bricks working together named BDT. Not to be confused with Jamison’s legendary DDT. The fight is at 1:54:40 in the day 1 beetle stream.

This was an endurance fight, and SSR didn’t endure that well. It spent much of the time (as designed) bouncing around the arena on the blades, but either that or one of the hits caused a weapon motor shaft to break off.

If I had to guess, something bent just enough that the gear’s hub got caught on the disc. This was something I had thought may happen because the gear hub sits outside of the swept circle of the blade’s hub, so it could in principle hit the spokes. A lot of gear-driven weapons make sure the blade hub is a little larger than the center axis of the pinion for this reason, but I didn’t have the weight this time around to make the blade hub larger in diameter. Something else will have to give here.

The other weapon broke down because one of the motor wires got loose and was minced by the gear drive or blade. That’s just first-fight debugging finding all the ways you didn’t zip tie everything like you thought you did.

Knocking down the weapon drive system was quick, allowing me to assess the roots of the damage. I think the two-piece motor and weapon shaft mount (that bracket) might still be just a little too flexible, so maybe I can redesign it with the carbon fiber plate also covering part of the area to increase rigidity and unify things more too.

Because I didn’t want to sacrifice a spare weapon motor yet, I simply retrieved the shaft from one of the spare drive motors (of which I had more) and smashed it together again and sent it.

And send it did. SSR died a valiant warrior’s death against Mulsanne, a P1 beetle with a scorpion’s tail style spinning disc. This video is at 4:36:32 in the stream capture. This was a fight full of knocking chunks off each other until Mulsanne lined up the best possible killshot and cut through the 1mm carbon fiber baseplate and 3 out of 4 cells of the battery!

I honestly think I hit him more off-kilter and upside-down than driving on all 4 wheels. One of the weapons died about midway through, leaving me to actually take myself seriously and use the remaining disc as a reaction wheel to turn and drive for the last 30 something seconds.

Oof. What a way to go through. SSR skating around identifying as an undercutter or gyro walker for much of the time somehow made the whole affair worth it. I have enough spares to put this thing back together as-is, but am going to make some mods to the weapon designs as I mentioned earlier.

Not too sure what as of yet, since the thing is so packed full of gear that there is scant little to just remove weight from. Plus, I’m not sure how much thicker of a baseplate could have stopped that weapon anyway. It might be better to just trim some beef from the weapon hubs and go for reliability changes. Just don’t get hit, duh.

On my way back down, I decided to detour after staying a night near Roanoke again. This time, I went back through a different portion of western North Carolina to explore some roads that I wanted to visit, but because the east-of-Asheville area is a little long for a day trip, haven’t gotten to.

I do need to just spend a week wandering the whole place. I keep saying that, but am very bad at actually putting things down and doing it. Hence my recurring mention of day trips here and there.

It turns out the ass end of Route 197 isn’t paved, but no big deal. With excellent sightlines down the mountain, I just played some Rally Van Simulator.

A friend somewhere at the bottom of the mountain before I found my way back to US 74.

The ship landed some time after midnight Monday into Tuesday, upon which I neglected to unload any of the robots or gear for a solid week. No issues at all out of Mikuvan this time (which I again emphasize how unnatural this is and may indicate a credit line building for a future epic road trip explosion), except maybe the new radiator I installed the year before was too effective. I may have to check the thermostat and see if it’s stuck open some.

These events transpired right before I turned my attention to Vantruck to finish “Patch 1.1” and hit the Tail of the Dragon in April. So I spent a bunch of time after that in post project hangover mode, not touching a robot again until August in preparation for Dragon Con.

Your Waifu is Still Trash: Design and Build of the Double-Barreled Vape Cannon

chorl

This is a little mini-project that I decided to fork into its own narrative because I figured more than I would find it useful. In reality, the build of this thing was kind of interspersed with the dumpster itself, so you’ll see a handful of out-of-sequence photos.

To recap, YWIT version 1 used two first-generation CosClouds smoke effects units for the ‘flaming’ bit of the dumpster. These survived a bunch of abuse in the bot (being left loose to jostle around, accidentally run empty) but had the downside of an inconvenient long-and-skinny form factor and needing to be refilled quite frequently. They’re built to be worn discretely on a costume, and I was looking more for a rolling fog machine.

So I decided to get adventurous and learn more about the literal vape shop (not my memetic, metaphoric vape shop) ecosystem. There’s a whole little miniature landscape built around vape batteries now, with them used to power portable soldering irons, hot knives, and other stuff that requires brief bursts of power to turn into heat in order to cut around sales restrictions on smoking products.

The plan was to appraise the phat cloudz market and see what parts interoperate and can be modified for my purposes. Remember, I don’t inhale anything as a habit. I have the purest, untainted virgin lungs possible… because from a young age I learned smoke that comes off anything I do is usually very irritating (soldering, welding, burning chemicals, hot cutting fluids, etc). So let’s see what kind of damage I can do!

I literally went to a few local vape shops to ask about their product lines! I was very upfront about the fact that I don’t vape, have no idea what’s going on, am using these things for unintended purposes, and they were welcome to upsell me on whatever.

Honestly… a lot of places didn’t even know that much about their own products. But a local XhaleCity was super responsive in laying out the goods in front of me and giving me a rundown of what fits what. The long and short of it is, almost everything I’d care to use has a M7 x 0.5mm thread called “510” for whatever reason, and just about everything else uses a M12 x 0.5mm thread called eGo.

I walked out of there with two Geekvape Z-FLI units with 0.15 ohm stock coils. Geez, I remember when sub-ohm vaping was a meme passing around makerdom and here we are just casually hitting tenth-ohms now. I don’t think you could ever convince me to stick a hundred watts in my face, but here we are.

Oh, yeah, they come with 0.4 ohm “lower power” coils. I’m guessing I’ll probably be running these instead because I’m looking for a little more continuous duty.

I blasted one apart as soon as I got home. These are very intricately manufactured devices, with all the parts featuring mill-turn 4th+ axis action. It took me a little while to understand the airflow path and then to formulate how to tap into it to turn it into a pressurized exhaust path.

The gold assembly on the left is actually the “Coil”. It’s not coil shaped so much as a grid heater made in a cylindrical shape! That explains how it’s so low resistance and not the size of a pencil lead. My only real exposure to the high end vaping market up to this point has been hand-wound helical coils.

Along with these tanks, I picked up a few cheap 510-thread batteries. None of these would remotely hold up the Z-FLI in operation, but I was out to find out which of their connectors were salvageable easily in order to use as a mounting base.

Now, there are plenty of “DIY” 510 threaded bases for sale. However, the vape shop was 5 minutes away and I was trying to get this bot finished before a regularly-occurring end of summer work trip. So for now, I cast Jeff Bezos aside and focused on local resources I could just go get…. multiple times in one day.

All of these pen shaped vape batteries were constructed by means of a thin aluminum or brass tube with the 510 fitting pressed into the end. Not very securely, I might add. The candidate choice came down to which ones had the most metal in the center pin that I could drill out to create the air passage.

These flame-anodized 900mAh jobbies won, as the fitting was solid brass and the center pin was pretty hefty.

Teaching the Chinese to create flame-anodized finishes was a mistake.

The very very skinny wires are just soldered onto a roughed up area of the fitting body (for negative) and the center pin itself, made of nickel plated brass (for positive). Seriously, I think these wires were something like 26 gauge. Probably enough to carry the amp or five for a second at a time.

To pressurize the interior of the vape tank, I had to drill a coaxial hole down the center of the pin (on the battery side) and the receptacle (on the tank side). I chose 2.2 mm as a compromise between airflow and retaining some reasonable wall thickness in the brass for conductivity. The post is 3.5mm diameter.

Likewise, I took the coil contact out of the tank and drilled down its center with the same diameter.

The assemblage of processed parts ready for some test fitting.

Here is the result, a visible straight-through hole that allows me to inject the pumped air into the business side of the coil. One downside here is any unburnt juice that makes it past the coil will probably puddle in whatever container/housing I put these in. That’s just an item on a checklist, I suppose. I’ll just pour it out before every con.

I modeled up a housing where two of the battery 510 bases will be mounted. The base is basically a pressurized air plenum, with the holes on one end to pass wires through as well as to mount a barb fitting for the air hose.

The housing was quickly busted out of my Something-Filled Nylon still remaining from the robot-related print jobs.

An interesting bit of trivia: The M12 x 0.5 thread of an eGo battery happens to be the same thread that a lens locking ring for an S-mount or M12/12mm camera lens. And guess who just happened to have locking rings for S-mount lenses hanging around? That turned the battery connectors into bulkhead mounts real quick and easy!

A small amount of epoxy secures the bulkhead joints as well, since I wanted to beef these up against vibration and my gorilla style overtightening. Same goes for the little 1/8″ barb fitting, since its thread was too short to use a nut with on the other side.

The connectors are wired up independently with 20 gauge silicone wire. I’ll be joining them externally in series to run off approximately 6 volts, which is the supply voltage for the air pump.

Here’s the resulting Double-Barreled Vape Cannon! I was fairly pleased with this 2-day build and it did work very well on the bench. If I had to revise it with more time to spare, I’d definitely use the all-metal “DIY mount” ones because they are more secure.

Final Integration Time

With the Double Barreled Vape Cannon finished, I could actually put the robot together now since they’re kind of a pain to reach otherwise.

I made these drill bit piloting jigs to clamp onto the sides of the Dumpsty so I could locate the holes for the drive pods. They were drilled with a healthy amount of clearance, basically a 1/4″ hole for the #10 screws, so I could make a bit of adjustment to the location if need be. This is not a precision application in any sense.

Here’s one wheel module mounted with some wide-head #10 self-tapping plastic screws going into the nylon body. The “locating feature” built into the bottom of the pod straddles where the center baseplate of the robot was.

And…. honestly, everything else was just loading all the gear in. Remember that this part was basically built and tested on the bench beforehand.

The only new action here was that I whipped up a small snap-fit mount for the air pump, seen in the center. It uses two of the existing inboard motor mounting holes.

And a short test drive that may or may not have set my basement smoke alarms off:

ok they do work… whew

So here it is, in all its glory! Your Waifu Is Still Trash made its debut (sans Miku artwork) at Dragon Con 2024! There’s a short little bit of robot building I did for that involving Susquehanna Boxcar… so stay tuned there. I’m getting some Miku art done for it that will be printed and installed like the world’s most self-aware Itasha wrap.