Since it looks like I’m never going to work up enough motivation to actually write an event report, I’ll just link you guys to…
My Moto ’08 album on Facespace
and Youtube page for videos.
Overall: The arm gears proved to be as much trouble as I expected. The drivetrain, however, is fully dialed in. I never had any issues at the event with the drivetrain, except one loose pinion which was my fault for not coating it in Loctite to begin with.
The arm beam itself completely failed on a particualrly good punt (visible in the Igoo video), but that wasn’t surprising either.
In the end: no more rush builds for events, especially now. I paid for it dearly with a week’s worth of missed work that I had to make up, so the week after was double-time busy.
I’ll repair the arm and tidy up the rest of the bot for whichever event comes next. Oh, and rebuild the gear mechanism, since it sucks.
nice bot…looks like you could use a phototransistor to automatically trigger the arm…you could “toggle” through automatic and manual triggering from your remote depending on the situation by using a microcontroller…
And also I wanted a servo mode where the arm position depended on stick position, so I didn’t have to fiddle with hitting the stick at just the right time. But there wasn’t any time for that -_-