{"id":110,"date":"2007-12-15T06:08:31","date_gmt":"2007-12-15T10:08:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.etotheipiplusone.net\/?p=110"},"modified":"2007-12-15T16:13:16","modified_gmt":"2007-12-15T20:13:16","slug":"tb45mcesp1-update-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.etotheipiplusone.net\/?p=110","title":{"rendered":"TB4.5MCESP1 Update 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m seriously about to give this thing a developmental codename, like &#8220;Fluffy&#8221; or something, instead of having to type TB4.5MCESP1 the whole time. That&#8217;s longer than most bot full names.<\/p>\n<p>Anyways, in a bout of insanity (I&#8217;m some times prone to having these&#8230; some argue most of the time), I downloaded the 3D models of every type of screw or other random hardware I would need on the bot&#8230; and threw it all onto the main assembly. It ended up at almost 420 individual resolved parts. The Chuxx0rbox was not happy.<\/p>\n<p>No, this does not mean I downloaded 300 parts &#8211; just that a certain #10-24 screw model was used over <strong>130 times<\/strong>. Yes, there are about that many screws holding the bot together. Throw in a few #6s, 1\/4&#8243; bolts, and so on&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>So the finished model was probably missing only wires, duct tape, and Loctite. The wires could have been taken care of by Inventor&#8217;s automatic wiring harness routing software. I should ask for a duct tape option on future Inventor releases.<\/p>\n<p>The final weight was 12.3 pounds.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, 12.3 pounds. How on earth could a UHMW box possibly weigh that much? I had a hard time believing it also until I broke down each of the subassemblies and checked their contents.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The UHMW frame itself only weighs 1.3 pounds. That&#8217;sjust fine. I wouldn&#8217;t want it to be any less.<\/li>\n<li>Two of the drive gearboxes combined weigh about 1.6 pounds. That&#8217;s very reasonable for full 550 type motors in metal mounts with metal gears.<\/li>\n<li>The entire arm assembly weighs 2.7 pounds, wedges, motors, and all. Not unreasonable for a weapon assembly.<\/li>\n<li>The electronics  bays in total weigh about 1.5 pounds, including batteries.<\/li>\n<li>The two square feet of Garolite that form the top and bottom weigh .6 pounds.<\/li>\n<li>It turned out that I added about 1.2 pounds of screws.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Okay, so, what the deuce makes up the rest? The giant metal flaps that are the wedges. Especially the side ones &#8211; if I ditch those, I save about 1.25 pounds which could go towards armoring the rest of the very exposed and vulnerable UHMW.<\/p>\n<p>So it looks like I&#8217;m going to keep working on a better front wedge idea.<\/p>\n<p>The most logical way would be to taper a corner of the flat material that will form the wedges and form an angled surface towards the side.  Kind of like TB4 back in 2006.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/pics\/tb5\/dc06_8.jpg\" title=\"Things were so much simpler back then.\" height=\"384\" width=\"512\" \/><\/p>\n<p>  The problem that prevents me from immediately going with this idea is the fact that the D*C wedge was 1\/16&#8243; sign aluminum, which could have been a 5000 series squishy alloy for all I know (Bending <em>that<\/em> was hard without a good, giant vise, which I did not have at the time). And here I want to use full quarter inch metal. Clearly, making the bend is going to be an incredible feat.<\/p>\n<p>If I can manage it, though, the results don&#8217;t look half bad.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"\/pics\/tb5\/tbsp1_13.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/pics\/tb5\/tntbsp1_13.jpg\" alt=\"I'll call it... RETRO STYLING\" height=\"60\" width=\"128\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Actually, it looks dead sexy.<\/p>\n<p>Using this design with properly worked 2024 or 7075 (either alloy, I assume, would need annealing to bring them to a formable state, especially 7075) would round out the perfect bot upgrade &#8211; harder, better, faster, stronger.<\/p>\n<p>Harder materials on armor surfaces, better attachment to the chassis, faster AND stronger arm and drivetrain. Great, now I&#8217;ll go play some Daft Punk. Anyway, using &#8220;good&#8221; alloys for exterior bashing surfaces might not be worth it. The same effect could be achieved by layering some thin spring steel over a more inexpensive and common alloy like 6061.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve updated the TB4.5 project page to reflect the upcoming revisions.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and while the bot was in &#8220;fully decked out mode&#8221;, I made sure to mess around with Inventor&#8217;s rendering engine which was plucked from 3DStudio after Autodesk bought Discreet.<\/p>\n<p>When a renderer is good, it makes even the shittiest newbie attempt at using it look <em>really freakin&#8217; awesome. <\/em>So here&#8217;s a  TB4.5MCESP1 half-assed rendering. I had some issues with some of the lighting as the completely flooded wedges and sides attest to. A good 3D imaging artist could probably make it indistinguishable from the real bot, but there&#8217;s a reason I&#8217;m not an artist &#8211; I get to make the bot. Full-size image is 1600&#215;1200.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"\/pics\/tb5\/tb5_render_1.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/pics\/tb5\/tntb5_render_1.png\" title=\"How much I wish the top could actually be blue carbon fiber.\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Bot on!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m seriously about to give this thing a developmental codename, like &#8220;Fluffy&#8221; or something, instead of having to type TB4.5MCESP1 the whole time. That&#8217;s longer than most bot full names. Anyways, in a bout of insanity (I&#8217;m some times prone to having these&#8230; some argue most of the time), I downloaded the 3D models of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,30],"tags":[33,32,34,31],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bots","category-project-build-reports","category-test-bot-45-sp1","tag-battlebot","tag-fighting-robot","tag-motorama","tag-test-bot-45"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.etotheipiplusone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.etotheipiplusone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.etotheipiplusone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.etotheipiplusone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.etotheipiplusone.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.etotheipiplusone.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.etotheipiplusone.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.etotheipiplusone.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.etotheipiplusone.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}