A New Beginning, Episode III: Revenge of the Charles

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I’ve been doing a lot of these posts lately, it seems. Just last year, after departing my shopmaster/instructor position with MIT and hence no longer having a workspace there, I moved in to the Artisan’s Asylum, a local makerspace (which also happens to be the largest makerspace in the USA, founded and run for a while by the now creator of MegaBots). Now, barely over one year later, I’ve moved out again…

T H E   E Q U A L S    Z E R O   D E S I G N S   &   G R E E T I N G S   C O M P A N Y

…into something I can finally call “the shop”. God damn, remember when companies had REAL NAMES that didn’t sound like a syllable uttered while asphyxiating a small animal?

It’s about fuckin’ time. The hankering for workspace had reached a crescendo over the past few months between myself and Adam, my long-time partner in hood rat stuff & bad things, also now captain of Team Brutus. My recent contract projects have been bringing me newer, more interesting, and most importantly BIGGER work, and facing the prospect of having to also work on Overhaul again in a few short months (#season3), Artisans was becoming impossible. On the other hand, Adam has simply been making do without a permanent base camp for a while. Given both our proclivities and the rapidly rising prices in the area, it was another now-or-never scenario.

 

The building: a former clothing & sportswear factory which the company sold to new owners intent on eventually developing it into MOTHERFUCKIN’ CONDOS. DO YOU PEOPLE NOT. HAVE. ENOUGH. CONDOS AROUND HERE OR SOMETHING? I digress. In the mean time, which means the next few years as they figure out exactly how ugly to make the new block o’ flats (that building being my local benchmark for ugly as fuck and overpriced construction) they’ve divided up the former factory floor into a few smaller parcels to function as rentable studios or offices, one of which fell into our lap. You can tell I really love the new property development trend in this area.

It’s on a typical “New England First Floor” – which means floor 1.5, with the basement halfway down. and us halfway up. So, no driving vans in, but direct freight elevator access to a real loading dock 6 feet below. In other words, just enough to be a pain in the ass and just good enough otherwise for me to deal, as the world likes it. The inside is stupendously large for both of us who have been conditioned to think that working butt-to-butt in a shared shop with Isaiah the Last Indie Wirebender is natural and acceptable. Nothing against you wire art, Isaiah, but my robots have tried to consume your workpieces several times while I was machining, and they’re really reaching their rebellious stage lately, so it’s better for both of us.

It’s ~2,300 square feet when finished – shown above is pre-construction of interior walls – putting it right about the size of MITERS. The multi-layered heavy wooden factory floor is finished in a classic “Inconsistently Leaking Machine” fashion sure to fetch thousands of hipster Bitcoins per month in the future when it becomes someone’s hotbox closet floor ,because weed is gonna be legal real soon now in Massachusetts! Oops… I mean #MakeAmericaStonedAgain-chusetts

With the beginning of the new shop space, so shall my Artisan’s Asylum presence come to a close. Luckily, most of my life is containerized. Not only did I count on having to move relatively often, as long as I didn’t own the whole damn block I was working in, but having stuff in nicely labeled containers appeals to my inner Jamie Hyneman greatly.  I bought a dozen more totey-bins (which by the way are called ALCs, or Attached-Lid Containers, but searching TOTEY-BIN returns the correct result on Google Images!) to more finely divide some of my parts since they would otherwise get too heavy.

By the way, it’s been physically verified that Mikuvan can contain 24 of these things – 26 if I use up the front seat.

As with moving out of any space or building or home, taking a look back once you’ve restored it to the condition you found it is a little somber. Alas, great adventures lie ahead! Onwards, through the skies, and across the seas… also over a few curbs, because 26ft box truck. You know what? Driving a truck in Cambridge ain’t so bad! You just BIG your way everywhere you want to go! Want to turn left? FUCK YOU! Want to merge onto Route 28 during rush hour? FUCK YOU TOO!  Uber driver? FUCK YOU SPECIFICALLY IN THIS FASHION!

 

The robots in their new homes, free to frolick in the open pasture… oh, none of them currently work? That’s too bad.

 

I picked a convex corner to slowly grow out of. While we have a “space plan” this is the two of us we’re talking about here, so everything is really coming together somewhat organically as needed, so long as it is vaguely understood to resemble some plan, if interpreted selectively. In other words, #yolo.

My former “workbench” at Artisans is made of a 60″ wide wire shelf, and it will become the new 3D printer farm and shipping center for Equals Zero Designs. Not shown here is a collection of Craigslist workbenches that appeared in the space some time later in the week.

As luck would have it, the IDC was getting rid of its original-issue fixed desks and cubicles to make space for more researchers. The large office desks that were a familiar sight in my build reports from 2012 onwards were going to get replaced with smaller, more portable tables. So what’s gonna happen to them?

They end up with me again. The corner I was in was the first to get cleared. While the desks were taken apart and shuffled, there is a very high chance that my former IDC desk is now in our new shop, another somewhat fitting and poetic closing of one of life’s little loops.

A photo taken later in the week of moving when the benches have been arranged and the IDC tables have been erected again. Notice that they’re a little crooked. They did depend on the cubicle divider walls for structure, which were not part of the deal. I might add some additional legs or some bracing to the desk later. However, for seriously heavy-duty work like “I am putting my laptop computer here”, along with EE work, they’re fine as-is. In fact, the widthwise span has already been set up as my EE bench as of the now.

Charlesland fades into Bercustan as you move rightwards above, with the border lying somewhere on a 3D surface defined by the location of the last series of hand tools we borrowed from each other. I’m going to build a wall of lipo batteries soon and make Adam pay for it.

Now, no new workspace that we have anything to do with is complete without….

hella

new

toys

Oh my god. Holy Megabutts. What is this? Did I just buy a LATHE AND A MILL? Not even a Tinylathe and Tinymill!  A honest-to-Baby-Robot-Jesus Brigeport Series 1, and a Takisawa 14 x 30 TSL-800D toolroom lathe. HEY EVERYONE I HAVE CHILDREN NOW. MY POOR LIFE DECISIONS ENDED IN ME HAVING THINGS WHICH NEED CONSTANT UPKEEP AND PURCHASING OF EXPENSIVE ACCESSORIES ON A REGULAR BASIS AND WHICH TETHER ME TO ONE LOCATION FOR YEARS UNLESS I WANT TO SPENT A LOT OF TIME AND MONEY MOVING THEM!  

My children weigh 4,600 pounds combined! Don’t you dare call them fat,  you droplet of coolant curdle!

Getting these two machines – the result of an industrial auction – is a worthy post by itself, and we learned a lot about rigging and moving heavy things that week. There’s quite a few resources on the Internet from people who have documented their own DIY machine moves, so I will gladly contribute to it. Let’s just say it involved….

 

 

 Don’t look at me, I wasn’t driving.

So what’s next? I’m basically moved in and have been hacking at things for a few days now. Ongoing facilities improvements will occur – such as moving the machines to their final spots where power will be run to them. I’ve been kept busy by contract work for most of this fall so far, but #season3 is on the horizon and I have some new and exciting content for the Beyond Unboxing series coming up soon, not to mention Brushless Rage development.

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

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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)